Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Lauren Laventure's 49er FX World Report








Hello!
I have just returned from the World Championships for the 49erFX in Marseille, France. It was an amazing and eye opening event.
We arrived in France three weeks before the event started, and spent that time setting up our boat and training at the venue. The sailing venue was at Prado Plage, about a 10 minute drive away from the city of Marseille. We had a small apartment right across the street, which made commuting there every day into a 2 minute walk (amazing!).
Once we got our boat sorted and set up (three days of preparation), we were able to get out on the water for some training with the rest of the Canadian Team and our two coaches that came to the event: Mark Asquith (National Team Coach) and Rob Frost (Ontario Sailing Association Coach).
There are three general wind directions in Marseille: The sea breeze, the offshore breeze and the mighty mistral. We got a good taste of the mistral breeze during training. This direction can crank out winds of up to 40 knots, with massive swells, topped off with some nice choppy waves. Looking back, we are simply happy to say we survived some of those days…We took some pretty hard falls and got knocked around quite a bit. Most days, the majority of the boats that made it out had to come back in with theirs sails taken down (from all countries, even some of the top men!).
Of course, come event time, the wind decided to calm down and we spent a lot of time waiting on shore for the afternoon sea breeze to fill in. From about 1pm onwards, the wind would slowly build before beginning to shut off again around 6pm.  During racing, the wind would usually pick up somewhere between 5 to 8 knots, then begin to die until we could not race anymore.
The first three days of the event was the qualifying series. This consisted of 30 minutes races, where we raced in two 26 boat fleets. In the three days, we only managed to get 5 races off total. This means 4 races counted, while each boat got to drop their worst race. We had a great qualifying series and managed to sail consistently. Our races averaged around a 10th place, which placed us in 19th overall and into the Gold Fleet for the rest of the event (the top 20 boats). Our goal going into this event was to qualify for Gold Fleet. We were extremely excited when this happened! We were very nervous awaiting results after the last day of qualifiers, and when we got the news we had made it into the top 20, we were so proud of our accomplishment!
For the rest of the regatta, we only sailed against the top 20 boats in Gold Fleet. This proved to be an amazing and challenging experience. Erin and I are a new team, and we have been sailing the FX full time now for only 4 months. Although we sailed and performed quite well, the regatta opened our eyes and pin pointed our weakest areas.  What we discovered was that our starts proved to be our major downfall in the Gold Fleet. The FX is a difficult boat to manoeuver and we struggled to keep our position on the line when were under the pressure of the final minute before the gun. This made working back through the fleet very challenging as these top sailors are hard to catch! It’s always difficult to start a race off behind the pack! But that is exactly what this type of event is best for, to expose your weaknesses and discover your strengths. Although we struggled on the start line, we were pleased to have found that we have excellent boat speed and fairly consistent manoeuvers. Overall, we finished in 20th place out of a fleet of 53 boats, and we were second North American team.
Going into our fall training, we now have a solid idea of what we need to work on to be able to advance ourselves in the international fleet. More start line work, more heavy wind experience and more training in the gym! Worlds was an amazing event and we are looking forward to continuing our quest towards representing Canada at the 2016 Olympics.
I want to give a very special thanks to the Hudson Yacht Club, whose donation through the Corinthian Fund helped me attend this event. It helped us tremendously!
Lauren Laventure