"International racing"...

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