San Francisco, Calif
January 25, 2008

Sorry! It has been a while since I have written. I had problems getting online in Australia during the annual Sail Melbourne Regatta on Port Phillip Bay. I’m told Australia has good Internet connectivity but I’m guessing that the hotel broadband access was simply overwhelmed by all the sailors who were communicating around the world using Skype voice and chat services.

Wrapping up the Sail Melbourne Regatta, I ended up finishing ninth overall in the 47-boat fleet. I had some good races and some not so great ones. The good part was that I showed a very good ability to come back through the fleet. The catch was that I had to come back almost every race. It has been a while since I have raced in a big competitive fleet and I was having problems getting off the start line. The regatta was mostly windy which was great for getting back into shape and having some fun races. We had nine-opening series races leading into the medal races. This regatta was a combination of two events in one. The opening series was the Asia/Pacific Regatta and the opening series plus the medal racing was the Sail Melbourne Regatta.

After the opening series, I was seventh overall and just four points out of sixth. The medal race day provided us with conditions quite different from the preceding week. We were greeted by overcast skies and rain showers and very light wind. We were the first up. We started the first of two Radial medal races in about three knots of patchy breeze. Qingdao stuff, you might say! The first leg stretched out to almost 20 minutes and I rounded second and held that place until the second upwind leg where I moved into first. I was ten boat lengths from the mark with the committee signaled that they were abandoning. That would have lifted me to sixth but it wasn’t to be.

We headed back to the start line for the start of the second and final race. That’s when I jumped the gun along with two other boats. After we restarted I hit the right corner which had been looking good earlier. With the fleet up on my left hip, the breeze came back from the right, leaving me last by a good margin at the top mark.

By sailing hard, I clawed my way back to the fleet and finished two boat lengths behind Sari Multala from Finland who was the ninth-placer. The Medal Race double points for tenth gave me 20 points but I still dropped two places to score ninth overall. Australia’s Sarah Blank won the regatta handily, after finishing only one race out of the top two places in the opening series and third in the medal race. Sari held on to second overall despite her ninth in the medal race, while Kiwi sailor Jo Aleh edged out my training partner Tania Elias from Mexico by one point to take third overall.

For me it was a great warm up regatta for the season. I used it for training and to see where my weak points are leading into the upcoming season.

I didn’t get to explore much of the Melbourne area but, the night before I left, Tania and I headed to the Australian Tennis Open in the hope of getting tickets for the center court games. We took the train into town and after asking a couple passengers which stop we had to get off at we found our way to the stadium. Without reservations we had to wait in line for cancellations or returns. We lucked out and had the opportunity to watch some great tennis. The two games we saw were the men’s and women’s singles 4th round games. The women’s game was between third-ranked Jelena Jankovic from Serbia and Australian Casey Dellacqua. The first set went a tie break which Jankovic won and the second set was won easily by Jankovic. The Men’s game featured second-ranked Rafael Nadal from Spain and France’s 23rd-ranked Paul-Henri Mattieu. This was shaping up to be a good game but unfortunately Mattieu suffered a calf cramp and quit play half-way through the second set. Although we didn’t get to see as much play as we would have liked, it was still great to see professional tennis. The speed they hit the balls at . . . Wow!

The long flight home was pretty easy, but I didn’t sleep very much so I was exhausted when I arrived in Fort Lauderdale at 1:00 am. The next day I managed a little sleep-in before I went down to Miami to get my gear all ready for training during the week and for US Sailing’s upcoming Rolex Miami Olympic Class Regatta which starts on Monday. It felt good to be in the boat again and I had two days of good light air practice with Lisa Ross from Canada and Charlotte Dobson from Great Britain.

Right now, I’m writing this on a plane heading out to San Francisco for an Olympic Ambassador program. This is a meeting along with other Olympic athletes where we are informed about the Summer Games and briefed on how to conduct ourselves. We’ll get some insights on dealing with everything that goes on during the events so we are fully prepared and can focus on competition. The meeting is this afternoon (Friday) and Saturday morning and then it’s back on the plane to get back to Fort Lauderdale in order to pick up my coach on Sunday morning and head down to Miami to register for the Olympic Classes Regatta.

There are around 40 boats competing at this year’s regatta, including a lot of top level sails. Most of the Europeans who weren’t down in Melbourne are sailing this regatta, so it’ll be good to see where I stand against the other half of the fleet. For some of the European countries it is part of their Olympic Team Trials, so they will be on top form.

I expect to have nightly updates for you during the Rolex OCR. Racing starts on Monday and runs through Saturday.

I would like to thank my sponsors Carmeuse and K-Swiss  for their continued support of my campaign for the Olympic Gold Medal in Beijing 2008.

Sail hard,
Anna