After a busy but lovely Christmas at home, it’s now time to start thinking about kicking our campaign on again starting in Miami this month.
My wife, Emily and I now have five children. Sophie who is 15, Finn 9, Sammy 5, Elijah 2 and our latest addition, Lucy who is 5 months so as you can imagine we have our hands full at Christmas!
It is a great time though, a total break from sailing for me and school for them and a chance just to spend a lot of time together, even if it feels like most of it is putting Lego together!
With the weather as bad as it was over Christmas there wouldn’t have really been the chance to do any sailing in the UK anyway, inside with a cosy fire seemed like the place to be! New Year’s Eve was a quiet one for me, but we had a big New Year’s Day lunch with our extended family, which was a great way to kick off 2014.
I haven’t sailed a 470 since November as this period was more about planning, sorting equipment and raising the necessary funds to do a quality campaign going forwards. I have always seen our campaign as two phases, Miami marks the beginning of phase two.
The whole of 2013 was phase one - the time spent seeing if our team had potential and whether we worked well together as well as getting me used to 470 racing again. We also needed to make sure we had the right infrastructure to our campaign, equipment, coaching, funding and sponsorship.
We’re getting there with a lot of those things and I think with the results we achieved last year, and the consistency we achieved across all conditions, we proved we had a lot to offer in terms of putting together a really competitive campaign.
Read Joe's full blog here.