TV and Video

Hello! We are both in Calgary preparing for our fundraisers coming up this week. We have been busy organizing and promoting the events but also focusing on our fitness!

Yesterday we had an interview with CTV about our campaign and the fundraisers. We should have a segment on "Hometown Heroes" next week, we will let you all know when we know!

We've also put together a video from our training in Miami last month. You can watch it on our new youtube channel!

February Fundraisers

We are hosting two fundraisers in the next two weeks to raise money for our campaign.

Cheadle Comedy Night

Date: Saturday February 18th

Time: Doors at 6.30 pm, presentations at 8.00 pm

Location: Cheadle Lions Club Hall in Cheadle, Alberta

Tickets: $20 - available online, by phone 403-650-2674 or 403-869-4211, at Bank Gym Strathmore and at the door

This event was originally planned to be a dinner and dance featuring a local comedian. Unfortunately due to low ticket sales, we have had to cancel the dinner/dance portion of the evening. The event will now be a wine and cheese featuring a local comedian and a silent auction. We will also give a short presentation about our recent training in Miami and the future of our campaign. This will be a great event to meet us and learn about our campaign and ask us all sorts of questions! Ticket prices have been dropped to $20. This event is sponsored by the Cheadle Lions Association.

Brian Keating Presentation

Date: Saturday February 25th

Time: Doors at 6.30 pm, presentations at 8.00 pm

Location: South Calgary Community Association

Tickets: $50 - available online, by phone 403-650-2674 or 403-869-4211, at Glenmore Sailboats

This event will be a wine and cheese and silent auction and will have a feature presentation by Brian Keating. Brian is an amazing speaker, and will be talking about his recent trip to the Antarctic re-tracing the Shackleton expedition route. He just got back last week and has some amazing photos! You can learn more about Brian here. This event is sponsored by the Calgary Yacht Club and Newell Sailing Club.

Please come out for a fun evening to support our campaign! After expenses, all money raised at these events goes towards our campaign.

Back in the Great White North

After two months total down in Miami, Hannah and I are finally home for a bit!

We have been super busy the past few weeks, so I apologize for the lack of blog and email updates.

Miami Olympic Classes Regatta finished on January 28th. It was a really good learning event for us. It was our first World Cup Circuit Event as a team, and Hannah's first major 470 Regatta. We had Bunny working with us throughout the event, and it was great to have his constant support.

Overall we finished at the bottom in the event and didn't manage to beat the other Canadian team, however our goals for the event were not results oriented. There were many many good things about our sailing during the event. We have really good starts, winning several in the last few days of competition. We had very good speed upwind on 4/5 days. Our speed downwind was often very fast, but sometimes slow as we got out of phase with the waves and each other. The area where we struggled during the event was our decision making as a team. We rounded the first mark of each race in the top 5 or 10, but then we would make a majorly bad decision about a meanouver or a mark rounding and lose boats, and that is how we would end up at the back. These bad decisions were mainly due to our lack of communication, and partly due to us each not doing our individual roles in the boat. My feelings are that the decision making and communication will improve very quickly, and the fact that we have great starts and speed is extremely promising.

After Miami OCR's we had a few days off to re-cuperate, clean the house etc. Then we did another 5 days of training with Bunny. These training days were very intense and focussed, and I think very productive. We worked on many of the things discussed above - teamwork, communication, roles in the boat and decision making and I think we made excellent progress.

During this past week we also started to organize the logistics of the next phase of our campaign - going to Europe in March. I basically spent over two hours a day for 7 days trying to sort out the details of shipping our boat from Miami to Spain. Apparently this is very complicated! On our final day in Miami we loaded our boat into a 20' container at 7 am and at 12 pm it departed Miami on a container ship bound for Barcelona. We had hoped to share a larger container with some other teams, but this didn't end up happening. As a result, our masts had to be sent in a separate container with the Austrian team (they are too long for a 20' container) so we still have to figure out how to get the masts from Austria to Spain.

The one really nice thing about shipping, and about shipping in our own container is that we were able to send everything - boat, sails, tools, sailing gear, bikes, yoga mats etc!

After loading the container we said goodbye to the apartment where we lived for two months and we hit the road! Because we weren't transporting a boat, we were able to take a much more direct route back to Calgary. It was a totally different drive from the one down. We went through: Florida, Mississippi, Louisianna, Texas and then we turned NW and went through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and finally Montana! I was cold as soon as we left Florida and in Nebraska we were freezing! It will take some time to re-aclimatize to the dry cold!

We drove through the night on Wednesday night and it was absolutely gorgeous with the full moon lighting up the snow dusted fields. We arrived back at Hannah's house in Strathmore, AB just as the sun rose on Thursday morning. We are now continueing our planning for Europe and finalizing the details of the two fundraisers we are having next week (Feb 18th in Cheadle, Feb 25th in Calgary). We will post some more details about these next week.

Hannah gave three interviews to local community papers during OCR's. I have included the articles here. Brooks Bulletin and Chestermere Anchor. Thanks so much for the local press, it was especially great to get the front page of the Anchor!

It is so extremely nice to be back in Canada, if only for a short while! As I write this I am watching Hannah play shinny with my Aunt's pickup league - she has been complaining about missing Hockey since we left the country in November. I have to say the run this morning at 7.30 am was very cold and not nearly as pleasant as my usual morning run in Miami!

MOCR Day Two

So today was day two of Miami Olympic Classes Regatta, Hannah's first official ISAF World Cup event! So far we have had tough conditions and tough racing! We are learning a ton but man is the learning curve steep!

Yesterday we had a late start (2:15pm) which was further delayed because we are sharing a course with the Lasers and they weren't done yet. Light, patchy wind and chop. We struggled with our speed and ended up behind. After much waiting around we only ended up getting in one race as it IS still winter and the sun sets at 5 pm.

Today they switched our start time with the Lasers since we were behind races. We started racing at 10:15 am which made for a very early morning! We had three races. Overall we had really good moments and really dumb moments. Just inconsistencies with speed and also making some dumb mistakes tactically. Sometimes we were fast and in the right place, and then at other times we were slow or in the wrong place! It is all part of the learning process but the process can be a bit frustrating and painful at times!

Our third race today was probably our best yet. We had a wicked start, managed to get out left on the first beat and despite a small rules situation we rounded in 8th. We lost a few boats on the reach, gained a few boats on the run, lost a few more on the upwind and gained one back on the last run. The fleet is so small and the competition quite fierce, so one bad decision or tack means 5 boats sail by!

We are back on schedule so tomorrow we have another 2 pm start. This gives us a bit more time to relax and recuperate before more racing tomorrow!

You can read the race reports, check out the results and pictures on the event website.

Fundraisers in Calgary

We are excited to announce two fundraisers for our campaign in February of this year!

The first event is on February 18th. It will be a dinner and dance in Cheadle, Alberta featuring local comedian "Steve Stubblejumpski". Tickets for the dinner and dance are $50. Tickets for the dance only are available at the door by donation. This event is sponsored by the Cheadle Lions Association. Tickets can be picked up at Bank Gym Strathmore or by calling 403 650-2674 or 403 869-4211.

The second will be a wine and cheese and silent auction at the South Calgary Community Association in Calgary, Alberta and will feature a talk by renowned naturalist Brian Keating. Tickets are $50. This event is jointly sponsored by the Calgary Yacht Club and Newell Sailing Club. Tickets can be picked up at Glenmore Sailboats Ltd. or by calling 403 650-2674 or 403 869-4211.

Links to the posters with more information about the events are below. Please invite your friends and come out for a fun evening!        

Dinner and Dance Feb 18   Map of Cheadle Hall      

Wine and Cheese Feb 25   Map of South Calgary Community Association

Thank you to the event sponsors and to Scott and Cindy Meers for their hard work organizing these events!

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!

Back in Miami

Hello Supporters! I hope everyone had a wonderful Holiday. We are back in Miami training for our upcoming events! We flew in on Monday, and had a few issues with our apartment. We had given our land-lady permission to sub-let our apartment while we were away, but she mixed up the dates so when I arrived home from the airport there were other people there! So we spent one night in a hotel, and another two at one of our land-lady's other rentals. As of today we are back in our apartment and settled in.

We got on the water on Tuesday for a sail in very light, 0-4 knots from the NW. It was good to get back in the boat and also back in the sunshine! Today there was no wind, so we did some running around and some boat work.

Tomorrow the Alberta Sailing Association Head Coach Peter MacDougal arrives to coach us! We are super excited to have a coach to work with again, especially Peter since Hannah and I have such history with him.
He will work with us for the next 10 days and see us through our first regatta as a team, 470 North Americans. It should be a small regatta which will be a perfect warm up for OCR.

Keep checking the blog, facebook and twitter as we should have daily updates for the next month.