Camp 3 in Cadiz
Written by Dylan Fletcher | 14 February 2011
Camp 3 in cadiz was another great 9 days of training. Cadiz just seems to be delivering good conditions every day with a good mix to give us some variety.
A few more foreign teams were out there this time so now we have the Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Danish, Swedish, Finish, Austrian, Estonian and us! Its great to have so many teams including 5 boats from the top 10 at the worlds, it means we can always get some racing in.
We spent the first 2 days just training with Chris and Peter before coach Harv came out. Harvey had such a bad run of luck on the first few days, we thought he was going to snap! To start it off, the ribs battery was flat when he arrived because of the solenoid not functioning. Then all his buoys had would not stay inflated and he lost an anchor! The next day he fixed the buoys and sorted out the tackle only to hit a rock at low tide in the harbor, which blew the propeller up. Not a great couple of days for Harv and safe to say we let him know about it with Harv being the centre of most jokes for a few days!
Whilst that was all going on with Harv we were training hard. Similar to the last camp we were 4/5 hours on the water plus a gym session a night.
At least this camp we changed our focus away from the boathandling and a bit more on to the speed side of things. We think we made some good gains, at the moment us and our training partners Chris and Peter seems to be going quite well during the afternoon racing. There are still plenty of gains to be made and we have a long list of things to try and get done, but as usual there’s never enough time in the day.
Again we were eating a lot of food but did manage to work out that it was costing about €13 a day per person, not bad including dinners out and considering we are eating over 1.2kg of meat a night between 5 of us. Although I did manage to burst Chris and Peters lip with my curry, they couldn’t eat there dinner because they had just eaten a chili and I couldn’t because I was laughing so much! Chilies are now a banned substance in the dinner, well the tiny little fiery ones anyway.
So all in all in was another successful camp, well minus a few misshapes. We feel like we are making good gains and achieving our goals. Next camp we have a small regatta, which should be a good opportunity to see how our winter training has gone so far and how our boat speed is looking.
Right now we are back home chilling out, spending as much time as we can in the gym and sorting out the next camp. Training starts again on Saturday and the Regatta begins on the 24th. We will keep you update on the regatta via twitter, if you are not following us already then check us out at GBR49erTeam.
Once again we would like to say a big thanks to our sponsors Great Bear, Joules Clothing, Sunsail and Allen bro’s fittings.
Dylan