Day 3 in the 470 class
Written by Luke Patience | 11 August 2010
The event so far has been pretty interesting. Stuart and I like heavy breeze and waves and yesterday really played to our strengths. In particular the cross swell that comes into the bay, is a really difficult condition to sail and being local to the area and spending a lot of time training in the waters of Weymouth and Portland we are used to sailing it and handle it well.
Yesterday was breeze on and really pleased that we managed to get away with no damage, however there was a stack of boats in the fleet capsizing and coming back ashore with broken masts and damaged sails. It was a tough day out there and I’m please that we had set-up the boat on the safe side knowing that Weymouth is one of these venues where the condition may go either way.
The results so far for us are solid top ten and I’m pretty pleased with how things are progressing. We’re yet to have any big numbers in our score line so no discard to worry about at this stage. A couple of the boats in front have got some big results to discard so might be holding back on the start line a bit more, where as we are under a little less pressure in that sense.
Our goal for Sail for Gold was to test the event and see how the foreigners perform, who strong in the fleet and how we compare. We put no pressure on ourselves to come away with a medal as long as we are nicely inside top ten and not too far off a medal position then we will be comfortable with the regatta. It’s be brilliant being part of the pre-Olympic team, the whole atmosphere has been pretty inspiring and having everyone around creates a good environment to be in. Limited distractions and being able to relax with our team mates has made for a good week off the race course.
Thanks for your support