Good start to Rio campaign for Elliot Willis and Luke Patience

by Elliot Willis on 19 Apr 2014 Sailor Elliot Willis opens up about his and Luke Patience's performance at the ISAF Sailing World Cup Mallorca.

The Palma World Cup was the first major event for Luke Patience and myself since we teamed up in February, and I’d say it was a good start to our Rio campaign.

We’d had two training camps before the event which went pretty well – we instantly gelled. While it was quite nice for me to just initially get back sailing in the 470 again after a six month break coaching, that very quickly gave way to competitiveness and actually wanting to get the best out of ourselves.

We came out of those training camps fairly confident and happy with how we were going but with such a competitive fleet for the World Cup, there were still a lot of unknowns heading into the event as to where we would fit into that. It was important to manage our own expectations and not get too tied up with the result, even though we’d shown promise in those early training days.

We had a great regatta, and finished seventh overall. We made a few mistakes, had a bit of unforeseen boat failure with the spinnaker breaking but the regatta ended well for us – especially the medal race which was a good one for us. We had a lot of control in pretty tricky condition in the light winds, so that was a real plus point to finish off the week with that.

We’d been starting well all week, and we started well in the medal race as well. We came out of the line and we were allowed to control the side we wanted. We picked up a bit of weed coming down the first run, but cleared it at the bottom of the run and went back up the second beat really quick to end up finishing a very close third. It wasn’t possible to improve on our overall position in the medal race, so it just about sailing the best we could in that race, and we were happy with did that.

In terms of our overall highlights of the week, Luke and I we were instantly strong in the light stuff. On the really breezy day we had, we had a bit of gear failure which was unfortunate, and on the penultimate day when it got up to 17-18 knots we were quick and finished second in that race. All things look encouraging and we’re happy.

The communication side of things has also gone really well. Normally it’s the hardest thing when you get together with a new crew – one person does one thing and the other person does another – but I think we’ve gelled instantly and it’s been going well on that side of things.

We still have some fine-tuning to do with the equipment that we’re using and a bit more work in the breeze. We’ve had a bit more bias towards the lighter wind sailing, just because of the conditions we’ve been training in so far, but we’re really looking forward to Hyeres. There’s usually a big mix of conditions there, so that should make for an interesting British Sailing Team website