Andrew Palfrey reports Aussie Star Team's prep

by Andrew Palfrey on 1 Jul 2008 Andrew Palfrey reports on the Aussie Star team's Olympic preparation.

Hello from Qingdao in China, the site of the sport of sailing for the 2008 Olympic Games, which kicks off in five weeks.

We arrived here a week ago after two weeks at home following the European adventure. It has been a very hectic few days of logistics, boat prep, sailing, fitness stuff, eating and sleeping.

There was a fair bit of stress involved in the shipping and receival of our three boats. One boat was air-freighted from Europe and encountered a delay due to Chinese customs finding some pills in a bag and also some car bog for boat repairs. We eventually got that boat on Tuesday. Then the other two boats (shipped by sea from Miami and Los Angeles respectively) were released to us late on Friday afternoon, but only after Customs agreed to let us break the seal of the container (as long as we took pictures…??…).

Anyway, all good here. Got here almost a week ago and this is the first opportunity to draw breath. It has been 14-15 hour days since arrival. Been sailing twice, but have been busy optimising boats for the light winds and also fixing an illegality in the hull of the boat we plan using for the Games. To that end, we have brought over two boatbuilders from home (Mark Rowed and Chris Capel) and we have rented space in a boat factory here in China called Zou Inter Marine. I was there all day yesterday measuring our boat.

An eye opener… 40 employees. Last year they made 1,200 Optimist dinghies, as well as other boats. Hard workers without the apparent conditions that workers have back at home, but also without all of the complications we have back home. They look happy to be there.

Very nice people who always want to help you. The manager, Penny Ma, is a lady who speaks better english than me. None of the shop-floor guys speak more that one or two words of english. However, you manage to get by with a few gestures and a smile on your face. They run a great little operation and I have not met people as accommodating as Penny and her team.

Our training partners (George Szabo and Brian Faith from the USA) arrive today and will be sailing one of our boats with/against us, as we finalise our sail choices and continue to work on techniques for light air sailing in lots of current.

The weed here in the water is currently a big issue. It is actually algae, or blue-green algae. But, it is in weed form and the islands of weed can be as big as 500 metres in diameter and it is about four inches thick on the surface of the water. The people here say 'no problem'!.

* China has called in thousands of people to clean up an algal bloom at the sailing venue for this summer’s Olympic Games, a state news agency said. The blue-green algae blossomed around June 1 in the waters around Qingdao on the
coast of Shandong province, and some 400 boats and 3,000 people have been mobilized to clean it up, the Xinhua News Agency said. Chinese news photos showed the bright-green bloom along the shores of downtown Qingdao. Other
images showed workers loading the algae onto boats as windsurfers sailed in the background. The photos also showed people wading in the water and scooping up armfuls of the plant-like organism and putting it into white
sacks.