More Olympics and a different sort of cruising

A great weekend so far. The sailing was great fun in Weymouth and it was also good to be on the Breakwater rather than on the beach where you couldn’t see it. That said, it was a bit strange to have little idea of what was going on and having to phone Audrey at work to get a run down of what happened. Suffice to say, that the British men in the 470 got a brilliant silver and were thrilled about it. Meanwhile the Women also had a brilliant silver though it was tainted by the fact that they so nearly got gold and just made a wrong judgement call about which side of the course to go and fell foul of a wind shift.

Although I took some pictures, they all suffer from camera shake though like all amateurs, I am going to blame the equipment and claim that my long lens does not focus very well at full length. Here, however is a picture of the three person Elliot 6M match racing. The Spanish went on to take gold.

I had some more reflections on sailing and racing in particular. Unsurprisingly, I am of the view that we are better suited to cruising. If you get on the wrong side of a wind shift while cruising it is just an annoyance that forces you to put another tack in and perhaps miss closing time at the pub. While for a racer it makes all the difference in the world. We can get similar senses of achievement after making a successful passage. The buzz of arriving in Cascais last September was, for me, the equal of winning a regatta. I cannot imagine how it will feel when we do get across the Atlantic.

I am more and more wondering if we should look into cruising to Brazil for the 2016 games. I am not sure exactly how the timings would work. It would probably be necessary to head south in 2015 and get across the Atlantic at the normal time after the hurricane season ends. Then, you would need to head south and aim to get to Rio in the summer. I am not sure if there would then be time to get back north and heading home across the Atlantic in time. It would all depend on how far south the hurricane belt ran in the Autumn. To say nothing of what the winds do around there.

In more focussed plans, ours are still at the beck and call of employers. We will just have to wait and see. Chances are that our original date of 31 August is out for now. If, as I suspect, it is not till the end of September, that we get away, we will have to look at going down for just a weekend in September in order to get the wind generator installed as well as assure poor Sarah G that we haven’t forgotten her!

At least we would be able to get to visit the Southampton boat show! Small silver lining that.

On Saturday we visited my Sister and their new "dutch barge". It is a huge steel affair in which they intend to travel the canals of Europe and some coastal hopping in the Med. She is a beautiful boat and immaculately fitted out as well as being huge! I expect they will have a great time though sadly, the fact that we are now not looking to cruise the Med makes it less likely that we will meet up.