A week that began with great frustration with the continued ballast problems has hopefully now been solved. A new pump is on its way and in the mean time I will be using Aaron’s pump until it arrives.

Working on the pump

We are now getting into some long distance speed testing, normally a few hours in whatever the chosen direction is which is really interesting. By using Adrena we can look over everyone’s speed and heading at the end of the day in our debrief’s and see where you gained and lost over the run. By writing notes on when you changed something we can highlight what/if it made a difference and when.

It is encouraging that we are keeping up with the French guys, although the best guys always seem to get those few boat lengths over an hour or so which is frustrating at the moment! Loosing focus for just a few seconds and there’s a boat length gone, normally one you will only get back by waiting until they make a mistake, which of course the good guys don’t!


With more of the same planned for the rest of January I think the next few weeks are going to be extremely productive. We have sessions with our French fitness guru’s on Tuesday and Thursday mornings which are now our only early mornings, which is allowing more time for our own specific fitness training that we want to work on as well as boat work.


This weekend I managed to get to the rugby, Montpellier v Bath, a Heineken Cup pool game which was fantastic. As a wee young whipper snapper I used to have season tickets for Bath and would travel up to watch them play every weekend so was great to be able to get to a game again. Shame they lost in injury time however but still a good day off to reenergise for the week ahead!

Will be sure to keep you all updated over the next few weeks.

H