New Olympic cycle - New Look 49er Rig

The first ten 49er rigs were flown into the Uk and used for the first time by ourselves and the rest of the GBR squad last week in Hayling. The new rigs are Neil Pryde/Ian MacDiarmid "square head" sail design and Southern Spars 3 piece carbon mast, with new style jib. The rigs are some 6 to 7 kg lighter and around a meter taller.
On the water its still to early to know what the increase in sail plan and lighter mast will do to the performance of the boat and the optimum crew size and weight. The few days testing certainly showed the new rigs to be marginally faster, than the old, every so often the new rig would surge ahead when a crew found the "sweet spot". The challenge for the squad is to find the best set ups for the rigs across the wind range before the rest of the world, and for us to make sure our boat handling is up to scratch to take advantage of any speed edges!
We shall continue our new rigs development this coming week training back down in weymouth..........

49er Inland National Champioships

Grafham Water hosted the 2008 Ovington boats Inland Championships. A large turn out in the 49er class was all the more impressive with the forecasted freezing temperatures. Excellent race officering saw 7 races laid on over the weekend. Myself and Simon had now spent 30 days training in the 9er and it was nice to see a big improvement from our performances at Sail for gold the month before.
We finished in 4th place overall, with a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th & 9th places on our score card, we won the second day of racing with the 1st,2nd & 6th leaving us very encouraged we are slowly moving forwards. Our boathandling is still our major limiting factor, but we are finding ourselves "racing" far higher up the wind range where as just two weeks ago we would have been just trying to get around the course!
Starting is certainly an area for big improvement, with only 2 good starts out of the 7 races we were making life harder than it needed to be, but it was certainly pleasing to sail through the fleet both up and downwind. Hopefully when we get our boathandling and starting upto scratch we should be mixing it at the front.