Sail-World.com : It's back to the schoolbooks after Qingdao regatta
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It's back to the schoolbooks after Qingdao regatta |
The youngest ever Olympic crew of Carl Evans and Peter Burling report on their build up to the 2008 Olympics in the 470 class.
Hi – We’re back in NZ from China for a week, with 20 odd days to go till the Olympics start. Excitement is building. Even the Olympic uniform has arrived.
It was a busy, busy, time in NZ before heading up to Qingdao, China on the 4th July for a 'coaches run' regatta.
Apart from three weeks of school, including lots of assignments to catch up on, there were lots of boat things to be done.
We arrived at the airport in Auckland early knowing we would be around 60kgs over our extra excess baggage allowance. 90 minutes later, and after much negotiating, the $1000 luggage bill was down to zero. We finally walked through customs as they called our flight to board.
Algae, fog, current, light wind, Chinese customs being slow in clearing our gear, were just a few of the things we had to deal with when we arrived in China.
The bright green 'Algae', yes we could see massive amounts out at sea as we flew in The Chinese clean-up resources are amazing – 6000 Army personnel/ 100,000 locals/1000 fishing boats scooping algae out. Two 20 km long fences (barriers) built out at sea to keep the algae out of the sailing area are being monitored and cleaned by ships. Over 500,000 tonnes of algae have been removed so far.
Initially the course area was raceable, but by the time we left, the algae had increased so much that it was becoming a frustrating pain.
Our 470 was finally cleared from the container after 4 days waiting, security has really stepped up. The wait allowed us some time for retail therapy. Bartering at the markets was fun, $22 Levi jeans were a good deal, but our $50 bicycles from last year needed some repairs. We were also given a sneak preview of the Olympic village, it’s unbelievably posh.
Fog was unexpected, much too thick to race in and do any meaningful testing. (30m visibility) Rather eerie hearing the non-mufflered clean up boats but not being able to see them. A GPS on our 470 and another on the coach boat were essential to ensure we could get home in the fog. We were still able to use this foggy time profitably – getting a good 'feel' for the light wind and sloppy sea state. We were also able to 'run in' our new spinnakers (they look great with a full sized printed NZ flag on the front). Surprisingly, we are the only NZL Olympic boat with a spinnaker.
The visibility was good enough on 4 of the regatta days to get good competitive racing in. Most of the world’s top 470 guys and girls (invite only) were racing together in a single fleet of 30 – the same fleet size as our Olympic men’s fleet. Being judged as starting early a couple of times (OCS, pulled out of race at the first mark) was frustrating but we still made the top 10 medal race.
We’re heading back to Qingdao on Mon 28 July. With all the lost sailing days, we have organised a few more days on the water and also need to check some of our gear that has not yet been cleared by customs.
We plan to attend the Olympic Opening Ceremony on the 8/8/08 in Beijing (600km flight from the sailing Village in Qingdao).
Our racing starts on the 11th Aug.
Peter and Carl.
by Peter Burling and Carl Evans
8:57 PM Sat 19 Jul 2008 GMT
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