July 9 - Day 1 of Racing at Europeans

It was a very long start to the regatta today! Our start time was originally scheduled for 10.55 am. So if you work backwards and want to be on the race course an hour early, and it takes half an hour to get there, and you need an hour on shore before launching and it takes half an hour to get to the harbour.... you end up getting up at 6.30 am. Then you arrive at the harbour and it turns out they changed the start time to 11.55 but didn't put it on the website. Then there is no wind so you sit on shore postponed until the wind fills in at 3.30 pm and go racing for 4 hours (because the sun never goes down this far north) and don't get home until 10 pm. Needless to say we are a bit tired this evening!

The racing did not go great for us. The conditions were light with choppy waves and big oscillations in the breeze. The first race we had an okay start right at the Committee Boat and tacked out and headed right. Unfortunately the wind decided to slowly shift 40 degrees left, so there wasn't much we could do about that. The second upwind we went the correct way but over-stood the layline. The second race we thought we made good decisions but then we were enlightened by our coach! I guess this is why we pay him the big bucks. We started at the pin and headed left. We thought our start was decent and that left was the way to go. It did come back right at the top but we managed not to over-stand the layline this time. Both downwinds our angle seemed really good and we thought we should pass boats but we had forgotten about the current farther out on the left that was helping out those boats.

So we learned lots of things about our race course today that we can take into our racing tomorrow. We were originally scheduled to race on a course about 2 miles farther away but they changed the course area on Thursday, so we hadn't had a chance to train on the new course before the event. While the new course area is closer, it is also full of un-marked rocks! Never mind just avoiding them, it is rather annoying to have a small island come between you and your ideal tactical race when you have to go around it.

Anyways, it is early days yet in this event as we have 13 races scheduled! 2 more races tomorrow starting at 11.55 am if there is wind!