Team 7 – April 2012

At the end of March, Team 7 Match Race went back to Cadiz, Spain for a second spring training session with the Brits.  The breeze in Cadiz that week was outrageous—- with 20 – 30 knots everyday for six days.  We had some interesting moments. While planing downwind in 25 knots, the boat all of a sudden rounded up and broached. We were questioning Sally’s driving skills, but then understood when we saw most of the rudder floating next to the boat.  Our rudder had snapped off, and we had no steerage!  The next day, we witnessed an epic wipeout by Team Macgregor that resulted in Lucy getting 10 staples in her head. (She’s all good now – and the staples have been removed.)  Besides these couple of setbacks, our training was great. We really figured out all of our heavy air boat handling, and our downwind boat speed improved tremendously.

From Cadiz, we went to Palma to the Princess Sofia Regatta, the second ISAF World Cup regatta of 2012.  Our regatta started off well, but didn’t end up as we were hoping.  We had a great quarterfinals match up with Tamara Echegoyen from Spain, with her edging us out 3-1 to take the series and knock us into the 5-8 sailoffs.  We ended up 8th and while we were disappointed we knew we sailed a lot of solid races and it will only help us going forward. Read the rest of this entry →