Perth Final Day
Written by Chris Draper | 21 November 2010
Hello all, sadly the event is over and we didn't quite get the result we were looking for. However, we will leave this event and head into our winter training feeling more confident than ever.
We posted a 9,6 yesterday in the two gold fleet races that were sailed. We sailed ok races. The breeze was very unsteady and it was really hard to predict what was going to happen.
The first race we just got stuck in the pack at the windward mark and the leaders escaped. We wrestled well for our 9th. The next race we had a really good start but found ourselves on the wrong side of a persistent wind shift. To claw back to 6th in the 18 minute long race was a good effort.
The medal race today was again sailed in very unstable breeze. We had a great start at the biased starboard end of the line and were nicely on top of the fleet. As we approached the left of the course we tacked and crossed the fleet by a good amount. Unfortunately while trying to avoid a few obstacles on the course we failed to notice that we were sailing into a hole in the breeze and we rounded the top mark 5th. A bad run put us into last at the bottom mark but we managed to sniff out a few wind shifts and get ourselves back to 6th in the race. This put us 7th overall.
While it is our worst ever result as a team we feel happier than ever that we are moving in the right direction. Since Sail for Gold we have learnt a lot about the rigs and the tuning and have found some great boatspeed, as have our training partners Dylan and Alain.
We have also improved our starting which we felt was a weak area. We have plenty more to do on those fronts but we have already made some marked improvements. The uncharacteristic unforced errors we fell foul of this event will not happen again, that is for certain.
We will fly home tomorrow. Both of us are really looking forward to getting back to our amazing families.
On the 10th December we will head to Cadiz in Southern Spain to start our winter training. We have a great bunch of teams to train with out there and with the platform we already have we're both very very excited about the next time we will come together with the rest of the world to race.
Thanks ever so much to everyone for your support.
We look forward to keeping you all up to date with our winter programme.