After four long months we have finally wrapped up our summer season. As we both prepare for school we are taking a much needed brake from training before getting into our fall schedule.
The past three weeks have been spent competing at the Canadian Olympic Regatta Kingston and 49er North American Championships in Newport RI. We have been building up to this our whole summer and were eager to put our training to the test.
Starting off at CORK OCR we had a solid performance the first day, placing us in 4th ahead of our national team adversaries and the majority of the USA development team. During the last two days of the event we had issues with our main sail having multiple battens pop out of the clips at the leech, affecting sail shape and overall speed. This unfortunately caused us to miss a race and finish last in another. All said in done we finished 7th overall which was below our expectations, but left us hungry for our next event.
At the 49er North American Championship we faced tough competition, but we were determined to redeem ourselves. During the first day we came out strong putting us in 5th after five races. Unfortunately, we could not keep our composure the second day and had some poor race execution putting us back in the fleet. We went into the final day tied with multiple boats for points, making it a pressure race day. Without realizing until getting off the water, we had a line wedged under our mast butt, drastically affecting our rig setup and therefor speed. We sailed a smart day, but with the rig issue we could not match any other boats speed. We finished this event in 11th overall and extremely frustrated with our performances.
Although the summer did not wrap up the way we had hope, there were positives to come out of it as well. First, we had multiple quality races at both CORK OCR and 49erNA's; we placed as high as 2nd and 4th respectively. This shows that we have the skills and knowledge to be a fast and competitive boat. Second, there was a lot to take away from this summer that we will use moving forward in our training; many of them we would not have learned to deal with or overcome without the issues and poor performances. Finally, this has given us even more motivation to continue and improve our training before our next event, Miami OCR. After we take time to recover and look back at the knowledge we have gained, we will give an update as to our fall/winter training plan leading into our biggest event of the year!