GBR Match Race Girls

With it being a little cooler this morning the breeze came in early and racing started bang on time at 10.00am. We had a bye in the first race so we had an opportunity to have a good look at the race course, basically very shifty and wind ranging from 6-13 knots.

First race saw us up against the Australian team helmed by Nicky Souter. After controlling a tight pre-start, racing remained close but we extended on the final downwind to start our event off with a win. With such shifty conditions races were close all day but we sailed well to win against the Danish, Italians and Argentineans but unfortunately lost by less than half a meter to the American team helmed by Anna Tunnicliffe.

It looks like conditions will be similar tomorrow when we’ll be completing the round robin stage racing against Brazil, Portugal and the French, we still have to wait and see whether we’ll be on in the morning or afternoon.

Annie, Ally, Mary Rook and I are settled now in Porto Alegre, Brazil, ready for the start of the ISAF Nations Cup Grand Final. In the women’s division teams represent nine countries, FRA, DEN, AUS, POR, ITA, USA, BRA, ARG…and us. With both the women’s and men’s events running at the same time we’ll be sailing in two groups and half days so tomorrow we’re on the morning slot – ladies first of course!

We’ve had a couple of days in Brazil now getting used to the heat (about 30˚ in the middle of the day), but we definitely still have a bit of a language barrier with our lack of Portugese! This morning we had our practice slot in the J24s we’ll be using for the event and funnily enough they aren’t much different from the ones we’ve been training in back at home in Poole. Conditions seem like they’ll be quite light with flat water and potentially huge shifts so I’m sure racing will be tight and tricky.

So, registration and weighing-in done, practice time used, opening ceremony completed, now time to start racing, we’ll let you know how it goes!

Lucy x