Sunday, January 27th
Welcome to our first blog post! There have been some questions about an easy way to keep up to date with our sailing and as anticipated we plan to write a blog post for any and every important update about our team. We decided now is a great time to get the updates started as we prepare for our first big event of the year, the Miami Sailing World Cup!
Today was the first official day (registration day) of the Miami Sailing World Cup. Paris and I wrapped up our registration today around noon and then finished all the boat work that goes along with getting ready for the event. I’ll come back to that, but a little about our pre-regatta prep.
Last weekend we sailed the first regatta of 2019, the Midwinters Championships. We didn’t have the most fantastic overall result (14th/ 31), but it was about around where we should have been given where we are in the campaign and our big lack of racing to this point. I say big lack, not because we have been avoiding it, but because we have had so many other little things to focus on to get us even remotely race ready. Last fall and winter and all the way up to this point, we have been working on the other little things. We really dialed in the boat handling and mechanics to the point where we are ready for any situation that would occur on the race course. However, because of that, our tactical and starting game have been a little rusty. And that’s how we really felt on the race course, rusty. We made calls that as soon as we did them, realized that it wasn’t necessarily the call we should have made for 49erFX sailing, or similar little things like that around the course.
We did however, have one epic day of racing where we got two races in and finished with a 5,1 in some big breeze. But those days are always the most fun!!
After the regatta, we took two days off, before getting ready to sail again. We have been starting each practice day with some tuning with our Canadian friends, Ali and Mariah, and then we hopped on some racing that was run by some coaches, which included around 20-25 boats each day. It was great to take the lessons we learned from the last regatta and start being able to put them into racing these last couple of days. It built our confidence going into the regatta.
Now, back to today. The measurement process required us to weigh our boats, which means de-rigging just about everything on it and removing almost everything to lift it on a scale to make sure it makes weight (there is a minimum weight the boat is allowed to weigh). Some boats come in a little under the required weight, so in order to bring it up to weight, we have to add corrector weights. Once the weighing was done, we had to re-rig all the lines, put the blocks back on, put the mast up and the boom on. And while we are doing that we have to mark each part of the boat with stickers and record the serial number in order to complete the registration process. The second part, the sticker part, is not that difficult to do. It’s the re-rigging of everything that takes a little bit more time.
We managed to get it done and then we hit the water in literally no wind just so we could make sure that everything was working. We got out on the bay, did 2-3 tacks, pulled the kite up, gybed, pulled the kite down and the towed back in.
So, we are now ready to start racing. Tomorrow we are taking off from sailing and have the opening ceremony in the evening. I’ll give a little more detail on the event tomorrow when we find out the plan for the week and the forecast.
Thank you for reading and supporting us towards Tokyo 2020
Paris and Anna
Henken | Tobias Sailing 