With my hand and forearm bandaged and adequate levels of pain medicine, off we went for another heavy air day of racing after receiving clearance from The U.S. Sailing Team Doctor, Scott Weiss. Johnny and I were back on course looking forward to more breezy races and plenty of action.

Training partners Mitch Booth and Pim Nieuwenhuis. Photo: Gilles Martin-Raget / FFV © 2008

Race one was 16-20 knots and big waves. It was tough going and I’m not necessarily talking about the conditions. We had a great start and sailed a good first beat, but we noticed we were off the pace for the rest of the race. The first beats of any race really reward good starts and smart sailing and boat speed plays a minor role. After the first mark where the racecourse opens up, speed is essential to bring home a top result. We noticed we were slipping back and the first thought that goes through your mind is “what are we doing wrong?” At this level some of you would think we are so perfect that we’d naturally start looking at the boat and gear first for the problem, but this is not true. It took us all of two to three seconds of analysis it figure it wasn’t us and it must be the boat! We are not surprised because it takes time to get a new boat up to speed and it doesn’t help that our mast and sails, that we spent the entire fall developing, didn’t arrive in time from the New Zealand World Championship and we are forced to use a spare mast from another team.

The Tornado is not like a monohull. It is more difficult to tune. Because the alignment of the hulls, dagger boards, rudders and cross beams are critical to the performance, any one of these only needs to be out by a fraction to impact the boat speed. And it takes time to get it right because it may look good onshore but the hulls and cross beams are constantly flexing and twisting in different wind strengths and especially in big waves that only over time spent on the water and fine-tuning onshore will we know the set up is perfect. This is one reason you see many of the top teams sailing older boats and why we are trying this boat out here and not at the Olympics.

Race Two was 19-22 knots and even bigger waves. The land influenced the wind and it was very shifty. This race we had a less than perfect start and had to battled back the entire race. We proved once and for all getting a marginal start did not improve our speed, but it gave us more opportunities to nail some good wind shifts to finish 11th. Not a top finish for us normally, but in this event it has been our best result yet. We have been dieting and developing our sails for the light winds of China and it seems we are paying for it here in the heavy winds.

Tomorrow’s forecast is for Mistral winds of 20-30 knots!

The good news is our training partners Mitch Booth and Pim Nieuwenhuis are in second and sailing very fast in the heavy conditions. The other interesting thing is that the RC cracked down hard today and nailed several teams for OCS.

I am off to the doctor again to get more work on the hand. Hopefully I will get a good report. Stay tuned for tomorrow.

You can download full results online at the Semaine Olympique Française website - sof.ffvoile.net. We want to acknowledge all the support from our sponsor, Advanced Equities, and from our individual supporters.

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Charlie