Training with other boats

We picked Peter up at the airport late last night, so today was our first day sailing with him coaching us. It was also our first official day training with other 470's! lt was intense. We hit the water at noon and did a bit of stuff on our own, tacking and gybing and working on getting up to speed out of our maneuvers more quickly. Then we met up with two other boats. Graham and Jacob are fellow Canadians from Halifax and Anna and Brianna and their coach Adam are from the United States.

We tacked upwind in between a corridor created by the two coachboats. They made it more and more narrow as we got farther upwind, and the tacks came closer and closer together! It was a workout and we were quite out of breath at the end of that. Then we did some short upwinds/long downwinds to practice rounding marks and get back downwind. At first the legs were extremely short, and we struggled to get around the course correctly, but then as we got into it and the courses got longer things got better. Then we had some starts and a small race and it was time to head in!

It was a very intense 4 hour practice session. We slowly lost our intensity before Christmas when we were training by ourselves, as it is very hard to keep the pace on with no coach or teammates to encourage you. Hannah and I are both fighting head colds, so that didn't help either. We are looking forward to going to bed early tonight so we can start getting into an earlier morning routine. The races for North Americans start at 11.30 am so we will need to be on the water by 10.30 at the latest. We have even managed to convince Peter to cook dinner for us, it is so nice to have a coach around!