February 9th, 2020
It has been a busy week as we finished our final preparations for the 2020 World Championships that start tomorrow. We have had a bit of boat work to accomplish since arriving here in Australia, but we have also got in the sailing that we needed and wanted.
After finishing 4th at the Oceania Championships last weekend, we took a day rest. We both managed to relax and get some other work done, grocery shop, and refuel our bodies for the upcoming week. We sailed Wednesday through Friday doing both racing, starting practice, and checking out our new sails for the upcoming regatta.
Some of the practice racing we participated in was very close to shore in an offshore wind. It made it rather entertaining and also a little stressful since the wind coming off the land made the race course extremely shifty and super random. You won’t be able to guess every single puff or shift correctly on those types of race days, so we found it best to just laugh it off sometimes because its crazy unpredictable. Although these practice days can be challenging we were really happy after one particular day of practice racing because it taught us a lot about how we should be communicating even better in those types of conditions. It was good to have figured out better lingo and communication leading into this week.
Friday afternoon we went through measurement and registration. To measure, we have to strip the entire boat clean! We had to take the mast off, the control lines off, the wings off, everything!!! So then once its done, you get to put it all back together again. Everything went rather smoothly, except one small hiccup with the mast step which has been fixed with the help of Mark Asquith and the Ovington guys. Thanks! We put as much of the boat back together as we could for the evening and came back down Saturday morning to finish it. The boat is now all ready to go and we are pumped to get on the water tomorrow.
This regatta is a 6 day event. The first three days are our qualifying series which will determine who is in gold fleet (top 25 boats) and who is in silver fleet. The last 3 days are final series racing to determine your overall standing! There will not be live coverage for the first three days of racing (qualifying series), however there will be live coverage once the final series racing begins February 13th – 15th (we will post more about live coverage when the details are finalized by event organizers). This regatta also serves as our last and final qualification for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Although there is a lot riding on this event, we are both just excited to be where we are today and plan to just go out and have some fun! So thank you so much to our supporters that have helped us along the way to be able to even be at this point in our sailing careers. We are so incredibly thankful!
You can follow the results here and be sure to check in with our daily blogs to hear about the racing!
Thank you for your continued support!
Anna & Paris
Henken | Tobias Sailing 