Cadiz 49er training
Written by Chris Draper | 18 December 2010
Well we have been here in Cadiz for seven days now and are having a little rest day today, so I thought it would be a good time to write up our blog. Puerto Santa Maria in Cadiz will be our training base for the next three months. It hasn't changed much since we were here for the ISAF Worlds in 2003.
It is a venue that I have really nice memories of as it is where I won my first 49er Worlds. Peter did some amazing sailing with Alistair here as well so it is great to be back training together as a team.
We've had quite a range of conditions. The first few days were quite light winds with some sea breezes and then the last few days have been quite windy. While we have had some really warm weather it has also been pretty chilly so we haven't felt quite so guilty about our families being so cold back in the UK. We have an apartment that we've rented with Dylan and Alain for the three month period so we have a home away from home. We have been enjoying a bit of the local culture. We had a really nice meal at a classically Andalucian Steak house last night which was good fun with the barbie on the table and some local Rioja.
There have been a few foreign teams out here as well which we weren't expecting on this trip, this has made for some good racing to break up the handling sessions we have been doing together.
Dylan, Alain and Harv are all working really hard and we've been really lucky to have Simon Briscoe the RYA's technical analyst here to help us as well. The foreign teams will start to join us at the next camp when we return in the new year so we have been working really hard on our boat handling and getting all our new kit in good shape ready to test it against Europe’s finest come the new year.
The boat handling work has been really successful. We are learning a lot about speeding up many of the manoeuvres in various areas around the course, some of which we hadn't realised could be improved so significantly so we are really pleased. The 80 tacks completed yesterday though was pretty hard work but a great tester to see if new techniques would stand up under pressure.
The forecast is looking breezy for the next few days. We have four more days training before we head back to England for some Christmas and New Year festivities with our families. Fingers crossed the next few days sailing will be as successful as the last week and we'll continue to keep learning as we have been.
Thanks to all for your support, without all our sponsors and supporters help we would be back in England trying to sail in the extreme cold and achieving very little compared to our training here.
All the best,
Chris and Peter