It's official, the SPIN Sailing European crusade is now underway. After a quick break back home after Miami, we have flown out to Cascais Portugal to settle in for our time in Europe. With a short training camp in Cascais awaiting our shipping container to arrive in Palma de Mallorca, this gave us a good bit of time to plan a lot of logistics for the upcoming months and get ourselves into the right head space to be successful with our time. We are now settled into our apartment in Palma where we will spend the next month training before the Princess Sofia regatta. This is the first event on our 6 competition schedule leading into the start of the Olympic country selection.
Talking with our coach Francisco Andrade, we are putting all our focus into improving our skills before selection; we are treating all these events as training and taking each day and race at a time. Putting ourselves in difficult situation, playing risks on the course, and not holding back will benefit our learning process the most and hopefully translate to a strong, complete, gold fleet performance and the World Sailing Championships in Aarhus Denmark come August. Skills such as maintaining one hundred percent boat speed in difficult lanes, managing the fleet at mark roundings to come out clean with speed, building a good spot on the start to have a full speed acceleration, and being quick and confident with decision making are all skills we have identified as areas to improve. This means over the next 5 months of training we will be doing a lot of practice racing as these are all typical situations specifically involved in racing. This is one of the main reasons for our decision to travel to Europe; these skills come with racing in a talented fleet, something which unfortunately does not exist on a big enough scale in Canada. With our thought-out plan and dedicated, intense focus on each training session, we believe we will have the performance we are looking for when it counts.
Until then we are taking each day at a time working towards our goals, so be sure to follow along on the process!