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Hyères, France We achieved some kind of record today in Hyères in the Tornado Class competition at the the Semaine Olympique Française today. Stuck in windless holes, we failed to finish either of today’s two races inside the time limit and were twice scored as DNF (Did Not Finish). That sounds a lot worse than it really was. We had good starts in both races and in the first race we logged a very good first weather leg. But the flaky, fluky conditions today were enough to make angels weep, as evidenced by the scoreboard which shows sailors who routinely score in the top ten scattered all over the chart.
We don’t know what was bigger today, the shifts, or the holes in the breeze between the shifts. For a second day in a row, the sea breeze was fighting with the land breeze and out on our course, the results of that not-very-breezy conflict were particularly dire. Our strong start in race one, followed by a good weather leg put us in ninth or tenth place at the weather mark but then the wind began to shut off. And as the breeze dropped boats from astern were able to pull up level with us on the run. When the breeze got very fickle on the second windward beat, we went with the forecast and bet on the left hand side of the course only to see it come in from the right. There was a pileup of boats as the breeze died again at the weather mark. Our intuition and our luck didn’t fare any better on the run and we were one of the ten boats – nearly 25 per cent of the fleet that didn’t make the time limit and were scored DNF. We had another very strong start in the second race but dropped into the middle of the fleet on the first weather leg and struggled to recover. When the wind petered out again we missed the time limit by four seconds for the second DNF of the day. We told you yesterday about our "Lucky Seven" areas of focus and, although it’s hard to show that they had much effect today, we’ve made some advances in some of these areas. Now we need to translate that into results. We’ll have daily competition updates for you from Hyères. You can check the latest results any time at Hyères Tornado Results. If popups are blocked on your computer, you may need to control/click to see the results. Our sponsor, Advanced Equities, is at www.advancedequities.com. Sail fast, Donald Thinschmidt and Drew Wierda - Team Advanced Equities II |
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