Hyeres, France
April 23, 2008

Today was the start of Gold fleet racing. We had two and a half races today. I had some good finishes with a 7th and a 3rd place and was winning the race at the time it was abandoned.

The day started with a westerly wind at around 8 – 10 knots. The first race I had a good start, but couldn’t tack away to the right hand side of the course, which was the preferred favored side of the first leg. I ended up playing the shifts in the middle of the course. Although I was looking ok for most of the first leg, the fleet all seemed to get to the mark at the same time with the group on the right side having the slight advantage. I rounded in the high teens, but with the fleet tightly packed and with a turn of very good downwind speed and tactics, I rounded the leeward mark in 9thplace. Still faced with finding a clear lane and not being able to control where I wanted to go to gain the most, I lost a couple of boats up the next leg. With another good downwind performance I finished in 7thplace. 

Hyeres, France
April 22, 2008

WOW!!! Today was windy!  We got down to the boat park expecting to race at 11am and as we arrived they put up the flag to tell four fleets that they were postponed and then posted a notice to the other fleets that they were not sailing today because of the forecasted winds. At the time, however, it wasn’t that bad maybe in the high teens with a few gusts higher. So around 10:20, they dropped our postponement and we headed out to the course. They moved us to a closer course for safety reasons, so the sail out only took about 8 minutes. The sail out wasn’t that bad at all. I was one of the first few boats out and so headed upwind to do some warm-up. The more I got up the course, the windier it got. I practiced some boat handling and did some awesome nose dives into the waves downwind. Once I got settled down thought, I’m not sure if I would describe the ride as scary or exciting…but it was very fast, because now the winds were averaging low to mid 20’s with gusts close to 30kts. As I got back down to the race committee boat, they put up the postponement flag again and sent us back to shore. The down side to this was now that it was all upwind. But it didn’t take that long and once we were on shore they finally put up the “done for the day” flag.

Hyeres, France
April 21, 2008

We have just completed day two of the Semaine Olympique Francaise regatta here in Hyeres, France. We have completed four races total. Yesterday we sailed two races in an onshore breeze around 15 – 20 knots. Today the first race we sailed in shifty offshore breeze around 8-13 knots, and the second race in 9 – 15 knots. We have been sailing in split fleets of 39 boats per fleet. I finished with a 6th and 11th in yesterday’s races and a 2nd and 1st in today’s races.

We are sharing the racecourse with the men’s Laser class so yesterday we were scheduled for a late start at 2:30pm. This was fine because we got to sleep in a bit, but the forecast was for the weather to deteriorate and get windier throughout the day. And sure enough, the rain started at 2pm, just in time for our racing.