Skandia Sail for Gold countdown begins

It has been great to have been able to spend the last month down in Weymouth, training hard and getting in some good hours on the water ahead of the Skandia Sail for Gold Regatta. Last week in particular we had some pretty strong breezes but it was all from a fairly similar direction so there has not been much chopping and changing in the conditions. No doubt we will get something completely different when the regatta is going on!

We don’t mind that though, we haven’t really got favourite conditions as a team and although we have spent a lot of time training at Weymouth and Portland it is still not enough. We have still got loads to learn about certain conditions in the venue and the different courses, which is why every single time you go out on the water you take something new from it.

Skandia Sail for Gold is an important regatta for us but we are always looking at the long-term goal of London 2012 so not all our training has been geared to the next week.

We go into Sail for Gold full of confidence though. It was really nice to win gold in Hyeres [French Olympic sailing week - forth leg of the ISAF World Cup Sailing series] . With Kate only joining us towards the back end of last year and then our campaign taking a bit of a hit when Annie was injured in Miami [Rolex Miami OCR- second leg or the ISAF World Sailing series] in January, we haven’t actually had that long together as a team. There were a few particular areas we had worked on in the build-up to Hyeres and it was a really good feeling when they came together. It showed the hard work we have been doing was paying off and we were on the right track. It was probably the most together and strong that we have felt as a team, both in the boat and around each other.

It has been getting really busy in Weymouth and you can tell that the other teams are beginning to take it much more seriously as the Olympic venue this year but the venue is geared up to take large numbers of people and seems to be handling everything fine. We are still trying to get as much from the venue as possible but so are all the other teams and I’m sure by the time the Olympics start there won’t be a huge amount of difference in the amount of time we have all spent preparing on the Olympic race courses.

We’ve enjoyed a couple of days off this week, just to give our minds and bodies a bit of a rest before the regatta starts. When you are in the middle of a hard period of training seeing friends etc can be difficult so it was nice to catch up with a few people and just spend some time pottering around the house and enjoy being at home.

This weekend there are a couple of practice slots that we will be taking advantage of just to get out on the water for a couple of hours but we haven’t got too much to do and hopefully it will be a pretty laid back couple of days before we start racing on Monday.

Lucy

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