Athens Training
A great day today. Leg and shoulders today in the gym, breakfast and down to the boats by 12:00. Off the dock at 12:45 as we had no work to do before sailing! That is a first. The work list is getting smaller.
We tested downwind for about 45 minutes, then upwind for the same amount of time. Then we joined the others for racing. We were on fire in the first two wining both. Then we got a third and a fourth. I felt pretty good about how we sailed. Our boat handling is coming a long too. The wind is so shifty here that it is hard to tell about boat speed. But you have to have good intuition about what the wind is going to do next and then be very quick and agile to tack or gybe quickly before the rest of the fleet. This is what we did real well in the first two races.
Freddy and the others headed is around 1600. We decided to test downwind again fro about 30 minutes, change to another main and then sail back to the barn which took about 1 hour. We sail side by side and every ten minutes or so we swap sides…windward for leward..so that if one side is better than the other, we wash that out of the results. Just like those America’s Cup sailors do it.
We got the boats out and put away by 1830 but then had a one hour drive back to the apartment. They decided to do road work on the lane leading out of town (as opposed to the inbound lane) on a Friday afternoon at 1800. Phil and Austin went to the store to get some more food, I started the Bar-B-Q, made the salad and am doing some email. I got this mobile internet card and it is great. I can get online anywhere there is GPRS at 57KBPS.
It is still blowing Meltemi here. About 8 days straight now. It was 8-15 today so it is getting weaker. Maybe a seabreeze tomorrow. Haven’t seen one of those in 10 days. Lovell and Reynolds have never seen the seebreeze and they got here on the 15th and 16th.
It is the weekend tomorrow so no gym. We need to rest in order to build. We keep talking about taking a day off but we ask ourselves what would we do. We tried to get a T-time for tomorrow but they have a tournament. Maybe Sunday. There is also a go-cart track right near the Olympic venue so we are determined to get there one afternoon. For now, we are happy with the progress we are making and not too tired. For sure we will take off next Friday-Saturday and Sunday. Mark and Andy go home next week and Phil and I have to be “processed” by the IOC.
It has been great having Andy and Austin here sailing the other boat every day, and Mark coaching and taking the pictures. It makes it so much easier to know that you have a boat ready to sail with you, to do what they need to do so you can test what you want to test. This would be a lot harder to coordinate with one of our competitors.
