Gold at the Europeans!
Written by Chris Draper | 10 July 2010
Hello all, well we are really pleased to say that we are The European Champions! Today was a hard day, we had one race left of normal racing with the Gold fleet. We had a reasonable result as our discard so we were fairly comfortable for the medal race whatever the outcome of the race.
However it would have been nice to have had a good race and we foolishly attacked the race a bit too much. A high risk start meant we were committed to one side of the course which turned out to be the wrong one. We made a few places back but with little passing opportunities it was hard to make in-roads back in to the fleet. So we counted our discard.
Sadly for us, Stevie and Ben, the Austrians and the French had all had good last races. Suddenly it was all on in the medal race. There was quite a possibility we could walk away from a good weeks sailing with nothing. The medal race was really close to the shore. There was lots of confused water but a nice 10-12 knots. The first windward mark was the critical part of the race, we just managed to sneak around the first mark in fourth, ahead of Stevie and Ben and in a good position overall. We chipped away at the next boat in front of us and managed to hold a comfortable position in third for the rest of the race. This meant we had done enough overall to win the Championship.
It goes without saying that we are really really pleased. We've sailed together now for fourteen months and the hard work we have put in since we started full-time in November has started to pay off. It's now really important that we take the lessons we have learnt from this event forwards and makesure we don't lose sight of what has made such a good series for us.
Thanks so much to all our support network, our amazing families and parents, Harv our coach and all our sponsors for helping to prepare us in the best way possible.
Chris