New England Brings New Skills
After my time at home, I headed up to Boston, Massachusetts to start my next training block. I spent one night with my good college friend, Valerie, and even went to work with her! She graciously helped me get all of my gear (a huge favor to ask!) to Bristol, Rhode Island. We would be living and sailing out of Roger Williams University, a cute little university right along the coast! It was such a relief to be in the cooler weathers and so fun to revisit my dorm life. We started the camp off with a race day in a 12-15 knot sea breeze. This is the classic wind direction and strength for the venue. This camp was combined with the youth iQFOiL camp which means many more people on the water and more realistic racing practice. I settled into racing, and it was super fun and exciting to be back on the starting line with so many boards.
The next week of training would be plagued with light winds. Rain and cloud cover stopped the thermal based sea breeze from ever filling. Although it is my least favorite condition, it is the one I need the most work in, so the less-than-ideal conditions were a blessing in disguise. In this light of winds (5-8 knots) we can only do slalom racing as the sails do not have enough power to effectively go upwind. Hence, we did a lot of slalom practice. I saw huge improvement in my light wind gybes (the turn downwind) which is huge in slalom racing and simply surviving racing in light winds. When the wind is so light, the name of the game is simply staying on the foil since when you fall of the foil, you lose all speed and essentially any hope for the race. Gybing is the most common place to fall off the foil in light wind as you disrupt the flow of the sail and foil. Therefore, being confident in light wind gybing is huge to improving my performance in light wind racing. As the camp progressed, I found myself connecting gybes for longer than I ever had before and in lighter conditions! As they say, hindsight is 20/20 and even though I was very upset about the wind conditions, they were truly one of the best things that could have happened for my improvement.
After the camp in Bristol, we moved to Newport to have easier access to the Atlantic and its waves. We sailed all the way to Newport, which took 3 hours and was 40 miles! The long-distance sail was incredibly challenging as it was very light winds and all upwind. However, once again it had a strong purpose in that one of the iQFOiL racing disciplines is the marathon race so being able to sail for long distances (even in light breeze) is an important skill. The training in Newport saw marginally heavier breeze and we sailed in the waves for a new challenge. In Newport, we largely worked on speed upwind and maneuvers in the waves. After our 4 days in Newport, we sailed back downwind to Bristol. This time the sail only took us 1.5 hours and was super fun! We packed up and that wrapped up another great training block!
Valerie picked me up in Bristol and we went back to her house for a few much-needed rest days. I spent the Fourth of July in the Boston area and then flew to LAX for my next training block and regatta in Long Beach, where I am now!
