Hyeres, France
April 22, 2008

WOW!!! Today was windy!  We got down to the boat park expecting to race at 11am and as we arrived they put up the flag to tell four fleets that they were postponed and then posted a notice to the other fleets that they were not sailing today because of the forecasted winds. At the time, however, it wasn’t that bad maybe in the high teens with a few gusts higher. So around 10:20, they dropped our postponement and we headed out to the course. They moved us to a closer course for safety reasons, so the sail out only took about 8 minutes. The sail out wasn’t that bad at all. I was one of the first few boats out and so headed upwind to do some warm-up. The more I got up the course, the windier it got. I practiced some boat handling and did some awesome nose dives into the waves downwind. Once I got settled down thought, I’m not sure if I would describe the ride as scary or exciting…but it was very fast, because now the winds were averaging low to mid 20’s with gusts close to 30kts. As I got back down to the race committee boat, they put up the postponement flag again and sent us back to shore. The down side to this was now that it was all upwind. But it didn’t take that long and once we were on shore they finally put up the “done for the day” flag.

So that wraps up the qualifying series for the event. I qualified for gold fleet and am currently sitting in 5th place overall. We will start final series tomorrow and then will be able to drop our worst race once we have five races completed. The forecast for tomorrow is for about 20kts in the morning dying through out the day, so hopefully we’ll get some good racing in.

You can follow the regatta by checking the results online. I’m not sure yet what time I’m scheduled to start tomorrow, but if it’s a later day again, I may miss the report, but I will do my best to get one out.

You can, however, follow the results online. Semaine Olympique Française Website – http://sof.ffvoile.net

I would like to thank Carmeuse and K-Swiss for their continued support of my campaign.

Sail hard,

Anna