Here in Qingdao we’ve been busy prepping our Tornado, a veteran of the 2004 games in Athens. We’ve had some great practice days and we’ve had some great results with our secret weapon, the Chupacabra Code Zero that we have been developing with our training partners over the past months.

Team boatwright Donnie Brennan polishes hulls

As soon as the boat was ready we started sailing practice and we’ve been sailing every day. We’ll be sailing again today and tomorrow before we head off to Beijing. The cat is out of the bag – or perhaps I should say the sail is out of the bag – about the Chupacabra Code Zero we developed with our Dutch training partners Mitch Booth and Pim Nieuwenhuis and our Puerto Rican partners Enrique Figueroa and Jorge Hernandez. There’s a small frenzy here as everyone scrambles to catch up.

Chupacabra is Spanish for "goat sucker", the savage beast of urban legend that has gained a reputation in recent years of drinking the blood of livestock in the Americas but especially Mexico and Puerto Rico. We developed it to handle the difficult combination of light air and confused chop that predominates here in Qingdao. It has been creating quite a stir.

Testing the Chupacabra

The wind picked up for practice yesterday and we couldn’t use the Chupacabra upwind but it proved very useful downwind. Now we’re waiting for the right forecast to use it upwind as well. It carries an American flag graphic, so in the right conditions we’ll be racing the whole time under the Stars and Stripes.

With the fresher conditions, up to 12 knots, we were able to get out on trapezes all day and that was a nice change. The algae that got world headlines a few weeks ago is all gone. Our hosts did a great job of cleaning it up and that plus a change in the weather conditions seems to have dealt with it at least for this summer.

Launch ramp ready for action

We have a bedroom assigned to us in the 15-story towers of the Olympic Village, right next to the boat park but we’re using it mostly as a day-room for race postponements or similar delays when we need to stay close to the boat. Our sleeping quarters are at the Seaview Gardens Hotel where we’ve lived on our visits here over the last three years. The staff do a wonderful job of taking care of us. Most importantly though it means we can stay with our wives who are coming here for the games and we can have a break from the intensity of the village.

Everyone on the team is looking forward to the opening ceremony. It promises to be an amazing show. We’ll fly to Beijing on Friday and check into rooms in the Olympic village there, where we can relax and change into our official team uniforms before heading to the Birdsnest. We’ll stay the night in Beijing before returning to Qingdao the next morning.

I can’t finish without thanking everyone who responded to our recent appeal for last-minute funding. It has been very heartening to visit the site each day and watch the donation counter clicking up steadily to its current position of $20,981 as I write this. We’ll go into the games knowing we carry your trust and your best wishes.

Sail fast,

Charlie Ogletree - Team T-Squared