This past weekend Paris and I had four awesome days of training with US Sailing Olympic Coach Luther Carpenter. What made it even better was that Kristen Lane and Christine Neville came and practiced with us too. The breeze was consistently in the high teens and low twenties, with parts of each day being a little lighter or a little breezier. Each day we improved our upwind boatspeed and gybes. We are very excited about all the progress we made in a relatively short amount of time.

Yesterday (Sunday) we sailed all the way upwind from Richmond to Alcatraz. We worked hard on boatspeed the whole way and were rewarded by ending up on the edge of the Louis Vuitton racecourse for the day’s race between Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa. We thought we were fast but our jaws dropped when the Emirates AC72 flew right by us as we sailed between Alcatraz and Angel Island. For our sail back home it was about 25 knots with puffs nearing 30 – just glad it was flooding!

Thank you to Luther, Christine, and Kristen for teaching us a lot! Also thank you to Richmond Yacht Club for so kindly letting us use their facility.

We have two more weekends of training before we head to the east coast for CORK (Kingston, Ontario) and US Nationals (Oakcliff Sailing Center, Oyster Bay, NY)!
Stay tuned for some more video and photos from this training session!