Apologies for not writing sooner, but as may have noticed from my tweets this week has been a bit of a tricky one. Having thrown so much at this regatta, it was a bit of a shame that the wind and weather was so wacky all week. I think it's fair to say all the snake and ladders didn't give us the best opportunity to shine.
It never like this... Thats what they always say about the weather
Having made a good start on day one. Things got really hard in the middle of the week. It's never nice to see yourself slipping the wrong direction in the results, but we woke up fresh everyday and gave it our all. The crazy nature of the race track saw a lot of ups and downs from the entire fleet. We just struggled to link the 'ups' together.
An eventful windward mark
One big improvement was our lighter wind competitiveness. In the past it Mary and I have found those conditions hardest. But this week arguably it was where we got our best results. On the final day of racing the wind was a lot lighter and we had some good consistent results. Alas it was a little to late, by that stage the points between boats had spread out so much that we didn't climb up the standings much eventually finishing in 20th.
While on the face of it we were pretty disappointed, with only a day of hindsight I can already see some of the positives. Light wind speed has drastically improved, starting was notably better by the end of the week and our boat handling manoeuvres have taken a step forward as well.
Waiting for wind on the final day
Next regatta for us is Palma OCR at the end of March, so between then and now we plan to get plenty more hours on the water training, though Mary is competing in an offshore race so we will work around that.
We have been container loading today, and then have a couple of days before we fly home. Looking forward to getting back to good old Blighty for a bit of wind and rain!
Thankyou to all for your support, I am as hungry for this as ever.
TP