Summer Season 23
I am writing this from Newport, RI on a bit of a break for a few days (a busman’s holiday whilst Rob races M32’s in the Newport Summer Series) but there are certainly worst places to take some down time from a busy summer! Most recently was Cowes Week and we had an absolutely epic week of windy racing - Cowes is always a bit of a marathon with 7 days of racing, thankfully only the first 4 counted towards the Cape 31 Season and there was plenty of action even with 2 days cancelled due to too much wind. On one of the days we were sent off on a coastal classic in the Western Solent in 25 knots with wind against tide, Gurnard Ledge was our first downwind mark with almost 3 knots of tide against us, there were breaking waves every few boat lengths and sadly our kite didn’t enjoy the huge decelerations so much and gave up, separating the foot and luff tapes from the rest of the body and leaving us with a nice sea anchor to try and retrieve!
Having said that, racing with almost 25 other 31 foot boats in 20+ knots was really good fun and sailing anything at close to 20 knots in the sunshine is a good day on the water!
Unusually, August has been quite quiet on the events calendar this year which has actually been really nice to have a bit of down time mid-season before a big push with 5 events in September and October - 3 x SailGP and 2 x Cape 31 Events to round out the bulk of this years racing. I’m looking forward to some shorter haul travel with the European stint of SailGP including St Tropez, Taranto and Cadiz.
Away from sailing, I am very excited to have finished my Physiotherapy degree and was ecstatic to achieve First Class Honours (third time lucky!!) Graduation is in November and my role at SailGP is very cool because whilst I am there in a sailing capacity, I am also leading the Soft Tissue & Recovery for the sailors on the team so it is a perfect crossover role and I will be adding in some more MSK work throughout the winter whilst the sailing season is quiet so it is a very exciting time on that front….
Victim of a wind against tide leg!!
