We travelled from Holland to England to do the second of the World Cup events of our trip, a short flight over to Heathrow , then a 3 hour drive down to Weymouth in the south of the island.
Ric and I stayed in a bed and breakfast for the first 5 days then into a house for the remainder of the trip. Weymouth / Portland is a nice community by the sea that was a one point a military base. The British changed the harbour into a massive sailing complex designed for there high performance dingy sailers to best the world, (and it seems to be working). This is the site of the 2012 sailing portion of the Olympics.
The weather was quite sunny and warm prior to the first race but of course went back to cold and windy by day one. Again this regatta was characterized by strong winds and tricky geographic shifts and a nice tide running most of the time. A good place to run a regatta!
We did have delay waiting for breeze the first day and only completed one race. After that we sailed on schedule with an extra make up race on the Tuesday. We really found out who had been working the hardest in the gym all winter and Ric was sure that he needed to do more in that regard.
Ric finished again in the silver fleet and was quite ready to get home by the final day, plenty to take away from the experience, (he will be back in August for the test event ).
All the countries had their teams competing and Canada was no exception. Royal Van had all our Olympic hopefuls there, including Zak Plasvic and Nicola Girke in the RSX, Mike Leigh, Luke Ramsay and Alex McCorkendale in the 470, Bruce Millar in the 2.4, Isabella Bertold in the Radial, Alex Heinzman in the Laser, Hunter Lowden in the 49'er .
This was also a qualifier for many countries for the Olympic test event and Royal Van did very well to qualify Nicola, Zak, Mike and Luke, Isabella , Hunter and Ricardo . So we will be represented in both boards, the laser and radial , the 470 and the 49'er , very exciting times. A big thank you to the Corinthian Fund from all of our sailors pursuing their Olympic dream!
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