Pre-Worlds Venue Training in Scheveningen
Written by Katrina Hughes | 11 June 2010
After a week off at home on Portland it was back out to Holland for some pre-Worlds training to gather venue knowledge and get in some good quality hours on the water. Upon arrival back in Amsterdam we managed to find our van with no incidents and drive to our accommodation ready to begin our training the next day!
The next day dawned and our first mission of the day was to collect our coach, Steve Lovegrove from the Hague train station. What began as a short drive to the Hague to find the station very quickly became an epic mystery tour as we quickly found out that picking someone up from Hague Station was like saying pick me up from London station; aka which one, and where the hell do we park? Disaster averted however and we finally found our coach and got back to yacht club (this currently being a building site, fortunately with a decent slipway but with boat parking on the pavement!) ready to unload and rig up our boats.
Two of the men’s 470 teams are also training out here with us, Nasher, Elliot, Luke and Stu, which should hopefully mean some brilliant training with some racing thrown in due to the abundance of foreigners, which for us is very worthwhile. The first few days saw mainly light breezes with a ripping tide, so the tide notes have been dutifully pulled out and dusted off, and we’ve been spending our first few days practising our tidal racing and the different affects it has across the course. Penny’s fortunate abundance of tide knowledge from the 2008 Olympic Games in Qingdao is now paying off, and having grown up sailing in tide myself at Burnham on Crouch it’s not too new to me either!
Our days have generally started off with a bit of tuning with the boys, moving in to some short course racing to brush up on our boat handling and put our tidal knowledge into action. We have then been setting up some longer course races with the foreigners, our numbers being about 20 or so boats, which is great for us having highlighted some of our goals as communication and tactics round the race course, we get to put these into action!
Having now been here for five days it has still not stopped raining! Penny and I have been itching to get out on our road bikes but the incessant thunderstorms have put a stop to that, cycling in the wet being a bit of a no go a month before our World Championships, my skills on a bike being rather precarious at the best of times! I am even more keen to get out on my bike having recently got a shiny new carbon framed Specialized Ruby, which is my pride and joy, from our team sponsor Specialized.
We have a practice regatta this weekend, so we can start to put our training into practice and get in some big course racing with some good competition before the real thing!
Kat x