Trentino Garda Olympic Week, Lake Garda, Italy

After Hyeres MacBest had a few days off before starting training in a new location, Lake Garda. If you haven’t been to Lake Garda you should. It is one of the most beautiful places we have ever sailed in. We had a few days training before the Euro Cup started. Unfortunately due to illness our days were cut shorter than we ideally would have done. The Racing was a great experience with tricky chop and lots of wind. It was more like an assault course most days as we were sharing a course with the 470 women’s and men’s fleet as well as the 49ers, whilst dodging windsurfers that randomly appeared in the middle of our course. All in all though it was a great event for Kat and I, we had our ups and downs, the downs including capsizing 1 boat length before the finish when we were leading but nonetheless it was great to be in that position in the first place. Now we just need to tidy up our boat handling so that doesn’t happen again! Unfortunately we didn’t get to experience the medal racing as it was too windy, we finished up 8th overall which we were really happy with. There is still plenty more to do though.

On the way back from Garda we had an interesting trip home… my parents helped me bring the Volvo, rib and our 49er ‘Chardonnay’ home. The journey started off with the trailer board not working, less than ideal at 6am in the morning. Lesson 1, check the lighting board the day before you leave. After a bit of time wasted on getting the lighting board to work we were off. Next set back was traffic in Milan. Lesson number 2, add even more time on to the time you have added on for traffic jams. After some epic pit stops for refuelling the Volvo and ourselves we made good time across northern Italy and France. We were close to being a little late for check in for the ferry however we were happy we would be ok, especially after cruising through Paris with no hold ups, until we came to a stop, where we were in a traffic jam for nearly 2 hours! Not good for the stress levels. It turns out the traffic jam was just from rubber necking, even more frustrating. By this time our ETA for Caen was 2303 with the ferry leaving at 2300. We had a bit on. Thanks to one of our sponsors Brittany Ferries we were able to explain our situation and as long as we were not going to be ridiculously late they would hold the doors open for us. We arrived at the port at 2303 and the ferry had left the dock by 2310. We are incredibly grateful for Brittany Ferries for being so understanding and holding the Ferry for 10 minutes, we can’t thank you enough!