Four Days Of Great Training At The CMRC

April 15, 2010
Ft. Lauderdale, FL

Team Tunnicliffe and the rest of the USSTAG match racing members just wrapped up a training camp in Chicago. We used the new Chicago Match Race Center¹s new Elliot 6m¹s and had a fabulous camp. The three USA teams were there and we were joined by the New Zealand team of Sam, Jenna, and Ray.

Photo: (c) Dave Hein, April 2010

The camp lasted for four days, Monday through Thursday, and we had four different types of conditions. Monday¹s conditions were light winds and lumpy water. For our team, these conditions were great because we feel this was where we need to make the most improvement. Tuesday was cold, windy and very wavy. We were training about 300m off the sea wall and had a lot of backwash from the waves, but again, this made for fun downwind legs, and forced us to be really on top of our boat handling. Wednesday was again a lighter day, but the chop was much less, so it allowed us to concentrate just on making our maneuvers. And the final day provided a strong, puffy off-shore wind that made racing very tight. All week we had practiced specific parts of a race, and on the final day, we put them all into practice. Because the water was flat, we got going quite quickly on the downwind legs, and got blown over a couple times on the upwind legs as a 25kt puff hit us.

Relaxing After Sailing With New Friends

Photo: (c) Dave Hein, April 2010

It was a great week of training, just what Team Tunnicliffe needed as we head into our next regatta in Hyeres, France next weekend. We are heading over to France on Sunday to start training Tuesday. The regatta is the Semaine Olympique Francaise, and is the fourth stop on the ISAF Sailing World Cup series. In addition to this event, our team is doing two additional events immediately following the SOF regatta. It will be a long trip with a lot of racing, but we¹re looking forward to playing the game again.

In addition to the camp, Anna flew to St. Louis on Tuesday afternoon to be a guest speaker at a fundraiser for the Leukemia Society. Anna and Gary Jobson were the speakers for the event; it was an opportunity to raise money for the cause and help in the build-up for the St. Louis¹ area Leukemia Cup regatta held at the end of May at Lake Carlyle.

We would like to give a big thanks to the Chicago Match Race Center and its staff for their help and support this week. Also a big thanks to Jen Wilson for housing us while we were up there.

We would like to thank Carmeuse and Trinity Yachts for their continued support of our campaign for the 2012 Olympics in London. We would also like to thank USSTAG for their support.

Sail Hard,

Anna
Team Tunnicliffe