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wMonday, July 10, 2006 | |
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Cascais International Sailing Week Hello from Cascais, I have already been in Cascais, Portugal for the past 6 days. The Cascais International Sailing Week regatta finished yesterday after 12 races. I wanted to sail in this regatta to get an idea of what the venue and the racing is like here, as next year, the ISAF World Sailing Championships for all Olympic classes are here, the first of four Olympic qualifiers. Next year we will be competing for 75% of the quota entry spots for the 2008 Olympics. I had a bit of a rough start to the regatta. I had gone home toVancouver for 2 weeks, arriving the day before the regatta. A couple of girls and I organized to fly in at the same time, rent a car from Lisbon airport and drive to Cascais together. After over 24 hours of traveling, I was the first to arrive in Lisbon and waited for the others to arrive as their planes were very delayed. Well, once it was all said and done, we finally got to sleep around 2:30am, with our first start that day at 1pm, which for me was 5am!! Needless to say, I was pretty out of it for the first couple of days. We had 3 races per day. The first day was the only day that it blew side shore winds and the wind was lighter. The second day got progressively windier and presented us with some bigger waves, which had me winning the swimming competition. The next 3 days the wind blew offshore and the water was pretty flat. The crazy thing about this place is that each morningthere was absolutely no wind whatsoever, and then all of a sudden, like someone flicked the switch "ON", the wind started to howl. We sailed in up to 35knots. The downwind legs were pretty intense. By day4 my jetlag was starting to ease and as I got reacquainted with myboard, I was able to handle it in the big breeze, finishing with a 3rd and a 4th. The last day of the regatta was reserved for the medal race, and since there were only 10 RSX Women here, we all qualified. I finished 4th in the medal race, which counts double and a result that we are not allowed to discard. With the few good results I had at the end of the regatta I finished in 7th. I am happy with my result here, even with all that swimming I did, as the fleet was stacked. Five of the six girls ahead of me are all World Champions and one was a 3 time Olympic medalist, so it was a pretty tough crowd to beat, but the best training I could do... to have 12 medal races in a row. Today is a day off to let the body recuperate before we start our training camp here for the next week. Hope all is well and till soon, Nikola www.nikolagirke.com posted by editors at 7/10/2006 01:27:00 PM |
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