Great end to the Sailing Season

I've been a bit slow to get this post out but I've had a couple of busy weekends recently to finish off this year's sailing with the Optimist Winter Championships and National Squad Training.

The Winter Championships were at Datchet making two weekends in a row there (I had been at a Boys invitational training the week before). 151 sailors took part so we were split into four flights with two groups racing at once in a race.

Check out the Crewsaver winter gloves

The Saturday was the first cold sailing day I've had this winter so it was full on with my Crewsaver thermals and dry suit. I also had some new boots and Crewsaver winter gloves. The gloves are awesome and definitely the warmest I ever had.

We had three races on Saturday all in very light winds which were very shifty. That's OK as long as you are in the right part of the course and getting the shifts right. The only problem was I didn't seem to be and think I spent to much time tacking to try and stay with the shifts. At the end of Saturday I had a 11th, 14th and 18th which are OK results but meant I was in 33rd place overall which I was really unhappy about. It still meant that I was in the gold fleet for the Sunday. 

After Saturday night in the Holiday Inn in Slough, fish and chips from a very strange Indian/pizza/burger/kebab/fish & chip take away and watching the 50th anniversary of Dr. Who (which I didn't get as I've never watched it before) I was ready to go out and do much better.

Top Optimist GoPro accessory
ready for action

Sunday was light winds again but I had a much better day of getting them right. In the first race I cleared all the negative thoughts out of my head and managed to get a second however I was a bit angry at myself because I let 1st place slip at the Windward mark. However in the second race I had a shocker- a 21st!! But I managed to regain confidence and get a 5th in the next race.

Overall I finished 9th which was a great result and my second best this year so I was happy with that.

The following weekend we had a three day National Squad training camp at Farmoor Reservoir. We had a real mix of wind conditions from gusting over 20kts to no wind at all so got some brilliant training done. I had my new GoPro pole on my tiller that SailSpy UK gave me (thank you) so was able to get some great video from behind me which you can watch here.

During the training we did some Team racing which I really enjoyed and some fleet racing which I came second overall in.

So that's sailing done for this year. I wonder if Santa will bring me any sailing presents for Christmas?!

National Squad 2013/14