Ready for training in Weymouth!

Well today was an excellent and productive day! Conveniently jet lag doesn't seem to affect me, so I managed to go to bed at 10.30 pm last night and wake up at 7 am this morning. I walked down to the Castle Cove Sailing Club to meet Morten and Jens. They transported our boat for us from Germany to Weymouth. The German Federation is currently training out of Castle, so their trailer was there with our boat on it. Morten was kind enough to drive me and the trailer over to the Weymouth-Portland National Sailing Academy, where we will be training. (Castle is quite expensive and we have received permission to train from WPNSA). I found some wind-surfers camping in the parking lot who were kind enough to help me get the boat off the trailer, and then I started digging through all the kit to see what was there!

We haven't seen the European boat "Quatchi" since 470 Europeans last September. While I trust Marlene and Annina completely (the german team who trained on our boat in October in exchange for storing it all winter) 470's are so complicated it is hard not to get confused and misplace things. Everything was pretty much there, so I moved the boat into the boat park where I found some familiar faces: Ollie and Andrew and Mike and Luke, two Canadian men's 470 teams. I started rigging and I have to say I love our European boat. It is rigged just a little bit more intuitively than our boat back at home. Things make more sense and are less complicated and they work better. The boat went together very straight-forwardly. There are a few more things to fix but nothing major. I quite early and headed back into town to pick up a few things. I haven't been to Weymouth in over a year, but I managed to navigate alright. I found the hardware store, the boat chandlery and the vodafone shop and got a good walk uphill in the process. Also, it was sunny and warm all day, which was excellent.

Tomorrow I will finish setting up the boat with our coach Bunny and go for a test-sail. Jen arrives tomorrow evening and then we will begin training on Thursday.