..nOT sO eASY..

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Even the Best Make Mistakes…

Star crew extroidinare Brad Nichol is crewing for Hamish Pepper in the Princess Sofia trophy. Today was not quite so great for the regatta leader, or should we say former leaders...

Today's sail out to the racecourse felt like an early June day on Lake Sunapee with cool clear air and wind coming for every direction. You always wonder what the day is going to bring when you sail alongside someone 100 ft away in the same direction on opposite tacks! We drifted around the starting area for 45 min before the wind came up abruptly.

After Hamish and I completed a short warm up (4 min on port, 2 min on starboard) we turned back towards the start line and spotted our class flag (signaling less than 5 min to go) and after sailing a minute down wind realized the P flag was up too (less than 4 min to go). Just then the P flag came down (1 min to go) and we were still two minutes from the line. The fleet started and sailed by us as we raced back to the starting line. Other boats were caught out also, Xavier Rohart did not even have his main sail up when the race started and four other boats started late.

Hamish and I sailed our hardest as the wind built though the race, whipping up some decent waves allowing us to surf down wind. We were able to pass boats and ended up crossing the finish line 10th.

The second race saw the wind building even more and we made some adjustments to our rig and made it to the start line in plenty of time. Unfortunately, we hit the pin boat at the start and had to do a penalty turn. By the second weather mark we had moved into the top ten but when we tried to cut off a few boats at the weather mark we did not make it around and had to jibe out. By the time we found another gap on the layline we had let a dozen boats pass and were back in the cheap seat again.

We worked our way to the second leeward mark and decided to go left. Just after we rounded, the wind went 20 degrees right and continued to shift right. We did all we could just to hold our position, and to end a bad race with an exclamation point, a Russian boat hit us just before the finish line when we were on starboard.

With a 10, 17 on the day we moved down to third place. Mateusz Kusznierewic (POL) moved from 7th to first with a 2, 2 on the day and Robert Scheidt (BRA) showed incredible down wind speed winning both races and moving into second. We have two more races tomorrow and two on Thursday before Friday's medal race.

Cheers!

Brad

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