Thanks to clamcleat for their help in making our boat the first to take advantage of the new class rule. They provided me with the ideal cleat to go on our bow to make adjusting the jib tack line tension quick and easy. See link to clamcleat website site with their news article... http://www.clamcleat.com/marketing/news_article.asp?theid=48

mw

Last weekend was the 2009 420 End of Season Championships. Nearly 60 420's descended on Grafham water for the event. We had a perfect start to the Championship with a bullet in the first race but scored our discard (10th) in the second. The 3rd race was another good result (2nd) which set the tone for Sunday's score card. We were lying 2nd overal on Saturday night, so all would be decided on Sunday. We knew that we had to put in some good results in the 3 races on Sunday and luckily we manged to put in all top 3 results (3, 2, 2), winning the event by a couple of points.

We got back last week from our first taste of 420 international events. Kiel, Intervela followed by a week's training was a pretty full on 3 weeks away. It was also a massive learning curve for us, mainly learning the "international racing rules"! Of course I have raced in the topper at international events, but apart from a few token Germans and Dutch it is heavily dominated by the Brit's and the Irish. The 29er was much more international with competitors from most of the traditional competitive sailing nation's like Australia, USA and most of Europe. But because of the nature of 29er (skiff style) racing you rarely meet other boats and in-fact usually try to avoid others and just go quick. The 420 fleet is very different, it is a truly world wide class with competitors from just about every country you can think of. It seems that most of these people 'neglect' the racing rules of sailing or at least seem to have their own! It is a very different form of racing than what we were use to in the UK and took us the last two events to get our head around it.

After Intervela we has a weeks training just along the lake at Torbole which we found very useful. It gave us an opportunity to work through some of our process goals with 2 coaches, the GBR team and at the venue of our World championships. We go out to Lake Garda again for our worlds on Friday and then on to the Junior Europeans in Hungary. We are really looking forward to these events now and feeling a lot more prepared.

MW

We leave for Kiel in less than 2 weeks! Exams are over for another year which is a great feeling and just looking forward to the summer events. We kick off with Kiel, Germany and this will be my first Kieler woche. I am especially excited about this event as it is one which I have never done before. The Olympic classes are racing for the first part of the week in their "ISAF Grade 1" event. The second part of the week (Thursday - Sunday) is when the international classes (inc. 420) race.

I will try to keep this news section up to date as we travel around Europe so keep checking!

MW