Team Jolly

Been a busy last few weeks, with a lot of freezing, a lot of driving.. and now finally a few days off!!

After Garda, we made our way up to Holland for the Delta Lloyd Regatta, which was the second EuroSaf event of this trip for us.  Its an awesomely run event, with live GPS tracking  on all the races, and quick and efficient racing on the water – luckily for us – as this happened to be the coldest Delta Lloyd regatta in forty years.  And let me tell you, it really was cold!  We had temperatures out on the water of five degrees – that may not sound too bad – and its probably not if you are skiing or something, but sailing??

So yes, the sailing was a bit of a struggle at times, we were so cold and numb on the water that our boat handling went to crap, and we were able to blame a few mistakes on brain freeze…  However it was the same for everyone, and we still managed to put together a decent regatta to go into the ‘final race’ in first, and then after a shaky start, managed to win the final race as well, to take out regatta number two.  We were lucky enough to have Simon Cooke (the only kiwi to ever win a 470 class World Champs since the class turned Olympic) up to coach us for the event, and although he froze too, we learnt a lot, and now have even more to work on!!

Here is the interview they did with us after the final race.  Be sure to check out Jo’s hat – she calls it her muppet hat – after all, our Olympic boat was called Muppet, and our new one is Gonzo (a blue muppet) and like to make sure we dont get too serious!!

Anyway, after our week of being numb, it was definitely time to head to warmer climates.  So after three days of driving (1845km) we arrived in Formia, which is about an hour and a half south of Rome.  Its a lovely coastal town, and we were lucky enough to arrive a few days before their regional Italian Championships 470 regatta – where the organiser told us this was the coldest June they have had for ages – about 18 degrees – felt tropical after Holland.  So this last weekend we took part in the regatta, where we embraced the warmer weather and the ability to actually feel our fingers – which obviously helps our sailing – as we came away as the overall regatta winners in the 44 boat fleet, beating all the boys!!  Always good fun…  The results can be found here.

Now we are off to Rome for a few days of touristing, it will be nice to have a few days away from the boat, and doing something different.  We cant be this close to such an amazing city and not go and have a look!!

Then we are back to Formia to get ready for the European Champs, which start on the 10th of June – the day before which we both have an exam to sit for Uni!   So apart from the exams, we looking forward to next week as it looks like we will have a large fleet of around forty women’s teams which is the most we have raced in a long time!

- This is us practising our touristing, as we went on a day trip to Naples and Pompeii last friday, pretty amazing to see a place in person that you always got taught about in high school geography!!

We got to Riva del Garda – at the north end of Garda Lake on the 2nd of May, and as luck would have it the Italian 470 National Championships were scheduled to take place two days after we arrived.. so we entered and took part as a bit of a warm up to the EuroSaf event which we had come here for (or cool down as it is absolutely freezing on the water here..).

We were a little rusty, but still ended up 5th place overall and top women’s crew.  Then came the one we were here for, the 2013 EuroSaf event… It was five days of racing, with a total of eleven races sailed – we were meant to sail thirteen races but lost a day in the middle with no wind – day three, and was actually a rather horrible day – it rained all day, it was freezing and there was no wind… We got sent out to the race track, we drifted around for a while.. then came back in… so all in all a great ‘getting very cold and wet’ excursion…

Anyway! We started the regatta in a slightly different way to normal… very simple really… we switched places.  Polly was skipper (steering) and Jo was crewing, for the first two races on day one.  We actually went surprisingly well too!!  We were up in the top few overall, and won the girls division in the first race – although we did get a few laughs around the race track as Jo proceeded to trip over herself during boat manoeuvres and seemed to end up face down in the bottom of the boat more than normal.  Polly got a bit lost at the back of the boat with all the ropes she was meant to be pulling – although she was being ‘helpfully’ reminded by Jo…  Then the wind got up a little, and Jo’s weight on the wire was not quite cutting it, so the second race was not so flash!!  We followed that up with a failed start attempt in the next race, to end up disqualified from race three… (Jo was steering again – whoops…)

To be honest, since then, all of the races have merged a little, they were all rather cold (that we remember…) and we had some good ones, as well as one really not so good one… But it was all good fun!!!

We went into the final day in 2nd place in the womens fleet, with one ‘final race’ left to sail.  The ‘final race’ thing is a new format for this event – and it consisted of the top six boats going into one very short final race, where your regatta finishing score would be the place you had going into the ‘final race’ plus your finishing place in that ‘final race’ – All a little confusing, but anyway, all it meant was that the first four days of racing got condensed into one score (a 2nd in our case) and pretty much to win the regatta we had to step it up and take out the final race as well….

And thats what we did.   The ‘final race’ was sailed in a lovely 12-15 knot breeze, it was sailed ‘theatre style’ – so we were racing between two barriers on each side of the course - basically just meaning that no one could go too far in any direction.  A normal race for us used to be an hour, and now they are getting more like 45 min, but this final race was a whopping 10 minutes!!  It was pretty much a exercise in boat-handling, and luckily we still seem competent enough in that area! A little surprising considering the amount of time we have spent in the boat recently!  We planned the start perfectly, and once we got our nose infront we were off, to take the race win by a comfortable margin, and the regatta title overall.

So not too bad for our first event, we were pretty happy with how we went (most of the time) but more importantly have started working on a few of our problem areas, what can we say, learning is fun!

Now we get a few days off to enjoy Garda (Exploring the rather impressive mountains that surround the lake) and then we are back in the car for a 1400km journey to Medemblik in Holland, where we will take part in the second EuroSaf event of 2013.

It’s that time of year again, and we are about to head off to Europe again for our first few regattas of 2013.  We will compete in two warm up regattas held in Italy and Holland, before we head to the 470 European Championships which will be sailed in Formia, just south of Rome (cue tourist excuses for some days off).  Before building up to our big regatta of the year, the World Championships, which will be held in La Rochelle in July.

It has been a rather different build-up for us this year, with a lot less time spent on the water, and a lot more time spent talking to people, learning, and making plans.  We have started our Rio campaign by creating a solid four-year strategic plan, which we call our TPP (Team Performance Plan).  We want to make sure that what we are doing is extremely well considered; therefore the process has involved meeting a variety of people in and around sport, from management to Olympic champions, so see if they can find any holes in our plan, or things we may be able to do better…

The challenge of our next four years to Rio will be very different from our last campaign.  Four years ago we were new to the 470, and had a mountain to climb in what felt like a very short time frame.  This time around, we are starting from a very different place, we have learnt a huge amount over the last few years, and we are starting from the front end of the fleet rather than the back.  Everyone will now be pushing hard to leap frog us, so its a whole new challenge to try and win a gold medal in 2016 – which is of course our aim.

To make sure we can give ourselves the best possible chance, we know that we need to get the basics right, work out where we can make the best gains in performance, as well as making sure its still an adventure!  We are so used to being the team chasing the leaders that it has been rather hard for us to try and dial it back, and really look at these next four years, and in particular this next year with a bit of perspective!
So this brings us to this year, 2013, the first year of the next Olympic cycle and a huge opportunity for us to take the pressure off, expand our knowledge base, try things we wouldn’t have tried last time (look out for a little surprise at our first event in Garda), and basically just learn and have some fun (keeping the Jolly in Team Jolly!).  With our brilliant coach Nathan on ‘sabbatical’ for part of this year, we are taking the opportunity to learn from some different coaches, as well as going coach-less for our first event – on purpose – to see what we will learn from having to be self sufficient!

Later in the year we are also going to fit in a trip to the Olympic venue in Brazil, to actually get a look at the waters we will be racing on in 2016.  Then Jo is going to follow and ride some of the latter stages of the Tour de France (the good hilly ones!), and then we will go and check out some America’s Cup racing in San Fran (where we will hopefully see the kiwi’s give everyone a good smack down!).

So a busy year (we don’t know any other), but it should be a fun year and that is what we are aiming for!!

Sorry, we have been a little quiet on the information front!

We have been getting back into the swing of things, and keeping rather busy!  With sailing, cross training and all of the planning that has to go in at these early stages taking up a lot of our time…

Anyway, just a bit of an update, we had our first regatta back of the season, which was the Oceanbridge Sail Auckland Regatta, held at the Royal Akarana Yacht Club, where we had a rather blustery three day event!!

We were a little rusty, and did rather a bit more swimming than we might have liked, but still managed to come away with the overall title, taking down all the men’s teams which was fun!!

Since then it has been back into daily training mode, as well as getting things sorted for the next four years. We have our first boat of this next campaign currently being built at Mackay Boats in Silverdale (nice and local) – Proudly sponsored by our new boat sponsor Kingspan – and with our container due to leave NZ bound for Europe in mid March, we have more than a little on!!!

We also attended the 50th Westpac Halberg Sports Awardslast week, which was an amazing event to be able to go to, we had an excuse to get all dressed up which was a bit of fun – not our usual sailing gear and zink…

In other very cool news, we were both recently presented with our lovely new cars from the great guys at Flexi Lease, so we are moving up in the world! and finally both have roof racks and cars that can successfully tow a 470 around!  The cars are pictured below – on one of our team cross training sessions!