The Miami Olympic Class Regatta was held from Jan 16th through 22nd on Biscayne Bay. This was a huge event for the Canadian 49er teams because it was the last chance to earn a spot on the Canadian Sailing Team (CST), and be eligible for the Athlete Assistance Program (aka carding). Due to the overall poor performance at the World Championships (although we were still top Canadian), the 49er class did not qualify any teams for the CST. As I have been reading the fine print, it seems we were very close to qualifying at a higher tier at the Test Event, but alas did not achieve a top 10.

The qualifying series has completed, and we’re on the wrong side of the cut (for gold fleet). We never found our ‘A’ game, and struggled a bit with the very shifty wind and slow moving puffs. So far the ‘doctor’ has failed to arrive, and we’ve been racing in an odd offshore/side shore breeze very close to the shoreline… It made the sides have high risk and high reward, but always beating out the middle. That’s not our normal ‘style’ of racing, and we’ve identified that we need to be able to adjust our approach to fit the conditions quicker.

For the rest of the regatta, we’ll be sailing in the Silver fleet (out of Gold, Silver and Bronze). It’s not the end of the world, but below our expectations so we’ll be doing our very best to win some races.

The Opening Ceremonies were held a few days ago, and the week one events are getting under way.
The 49er class doesn’t start until week two, so we’ll be tapering the training down a little bit and making sure all our spares and equipment are ready.

I would really like to thank everyone for all the support we’ve received through this season so far. Thanks for following us, and thank you for those of you who were able to come to my fund raiser dinner in the spring! Wind Athletes, CAN Fund, Samson Ropes, Port Tack Charter, Royal Canadian Yacht Club, Royal Vancouver Yacht Club and West Vancouver Yacht Club, thank you very much for your contributions to our 49er campaign.

Thanks to Gill, and Harken/West Marine for your support of the whole Canadian Sailing team.

Over the last few days the Australian national championships were held on the same waters we’ll be racing on for worlds in a couple of weeks. Needless to say, it was a great opportunity to get in a practice event, and gain some insight into our speed, course strategy and local weather patterns.

We had a bit of every condition through the event, including classic sea breeze conditions that typically fill in the afternoon, and the shifty offshore breeze that often dominates the mornings. This was a perfect scenario to preview what the conditions could be like for the Worlds.

Our event went reasonably well. We had great boat speed across the broad range of conditions, and had a relatively good grasp of the weather and wind. Of course it wasn’t perfect and we made a few mistakes as well (such as pitchpoling 100m from the finish while in first), but we’re certainly very positive about the gains we’ve made on the fleet and are looking forwards to the main event!

The Opening Ceremonies is tomorrow, and the first events start on Saturday. We’ll be looking to go through are entire check list before we start Dec 12.

The last couple of days have been very hot, with weak sea breezes filling in late in the day. While these are not the conditions we expect through the world championships, there is always the case of a large regatta promoting the ‘it’s never like this’ local conditions. We happily used this time on the water to gain some insight into the variability of Fremantle, and test new sails. While all the sails are supposed to be identical (as a one design class) they never are, so we sailed upwind for what seemed like forever hoisting and dropping sails (stored in the coach boat) until we had gone through our entire inventory and selected the ‘white’ sails we will measure in for worlds.
We’re checking off all the preparation boxes as early as possible!

It’s been a bit of a long week here in Fremantle. Most of our time has been spent setting up our new boat. There was a bit of a delay with hitting the water, as there has been a defect in production of the rudder stocks. The three new boats that we have seen (including ours) all have the same void in the aluminum casting. A few stocks have failed due to voids, and it usually results in collateral damage. We’re waiting for a new shipment, but I am not 100% sure that the ‘new’ stocks will be any better. Luckily, CYA coach Steve Mitchell was able to grab one off our boat in Toronto before he made the flight down, so we have a back up plan in place!

To make some use of our time, we’ve been lucky enough to borrow one from a local Australian team, allowing us to get on the water for a couple days so far.

The first day delivered classic Freo conditions, ‘the doctor’ (local sea breeze) filled in to a steady 15-18 knots, and created some rough chop. The sea state is probably the toughest aspect of this venue. The waves aren’t huge, but they’re quite steep and close together, making downwind sailing quite difficult.

Today, we were greeted by a strong offshore breeze in the morning. This meant the wind was very unstable, with large shifts and changes in velocity (yes I know, velocity is a vector, and I could have left out ‘large shifts’). After a few laps of the bay, the land breeze subsided and the sea breeze began to fill in. We had another hour or so in the sea breeze, checking out the various course areas and working on boat handling before calling it a day.

We plan to get out on the water everyday this week, and compete in the Australian championships at the end of the week. I’ll be updating quite frequently with our progress.

Thanks for your support!

After wrapping up our training camp in California, and spending some time at home, we’ve recently arrived in Perth, Australia in preparation for next months ISAF World Championships. The next few days will be dedicated to setting up our new boat, and getting all our spares ready so that when our coach arrives this coming weekend, we can solely focus on sailing through the end of the regatta. This regatta is the first of two events that will decide the Canadian Olympic Team, so we are doing everything possible to prepare.

Currently the weather is fantastic, with sunny skies and nice breeze… which makes it tough to work away onshore inside a warehouse.

I will update our progress as we launch our new boat for the first time!

Thanks for your support!

After a few weeks away from 49er sailing, we got back on the water in northern California. Based out of Richmond Yacht Club, the 49er fleet (consisting of a few american boats, our newfie teammates, the finnish, mexicans and bermudans) experienced some classic San Fran conditions. Most sessions started with a mellow sail out towards the slot between Angel Island and Alcatraz where we’d routinely be met by high winds and big chop. This was exactly what we came for as it replicates what we’ll see in Fremantle in December. I am very happy to report that we haven’t missed a step after our break, we’ve been very quick and, aside from a few lapses, our boat handling has been very good. Out of all the boats in our training group, we’ve managed to spend the least amount of time in the water… I am not a fan of getting wet, it’s usually slow.

We moved out of the Bay area and down to Santa Cruz for October with one of the American teams and the Finnish team, hoping the move south would prolong the seabreeze conditions, but so far we’ve seen mostly classic Vancouver weather… rain. Hopefully as the week progresses we’ll get some more wind, the forecast looks promising!

Thanks very much to Dan Brandt and the entire Richmond Yacht Club for being incredible hosts while we trained this fall, we really appreciate your patronage!

The Test Event has wrapped up, and we have just finished packing up and sorting gear for our next event in Perth.

The last few days of the regatta had some high and low points. After the reserve day, we had six races scheduled over two days. High winds on two of the days meant that we ended up sailing over three days, using our final reserve day. In the big breeze, we made some mistakes mainly attributed to a lack of communication.

Gordon and I are generally described as quiet people, so we can be a little short on words when we’re sailing together. It’s something we’ve identified as a weakness, and are working on improving. Our communication became apparent at this event because we were doing very short course racing in big breeze (4 laps in 30 minutes) resulting in the whole fleet converging at the first leeward gate at 20 knots. Almost every race, two boats would capsize at the gate on the first lap, but we’d prefer not to be involved in that at any time. After a swim and post race discussion of race ten, we really focused on communication at the leeward gate and made immediate gains in race eleven.

We had our two best races on the last day of the event. While we still made made a few mistakes, we executed our strategy a lot better. In both races we spent quite a bit of time in the top 5, and finished 10th and 4th respectively. This put us 12th overall, two places out of the medal race.

It is disappointing not to have made the medal race, but we made quite a few mistakes and learned a lot about the venue and our weaknesses. I am happy that our actual sailing and strategy is world class, now we need to develop our communication and confidence to take the next step.

Our fall plans will have us traveling to California to train with the Americans and Finnish, then we’ll be heading to Perth for mid November.

Thanks for following, I’ll have another update soon once I have finished editing the video from the event.

We’ve had three days of racing so far, and seen one day of light breeze and two days of quite fresh conditions.

Currently we are sitting in 15th, not exactly where we would like to be. We’ve had some very good moments, but also some mistakes that have cost us quite a bit. On the positive side, our starting has improved a huge amount, and our boat speed is generally good across all conditions. The bad? Well, so far we’ve managed to do penalty turns every day… and gone swimming in two races. We’ve also made some strategical mistakes.

While the conditions have been difficult for many teams (the current world champions have been seen taking a dive along with all the top teams), we are looking to clean up our boat handling, and getting to the race course area a little earlier to gain confidence with our strategy. The tricky part about Weymouth is the race course is very biased towards the edges… you can’t play the middle. The course is also so short that we are doing 4 laps in a little over 30 minutes. That means you need to take the first shift off the start line and pin it to the corner… then hopefully cross the fleet! We managed to do that yesterday in the last race, and were in the top 5 for the first two laps, but then we got caught trying to cover the fleet and ended up in the middle of the course… only to have both sides go by.

We’ve got two more days to go, and fourteen points to break into the top 10. We really want to be in the medal race on Saturday, and will do our very best to get there. I’ll give you an update in a couple days!
Thanks for following!