I did the race on ‘John Merricks II’ with a young crew from the British Keelboat Academy. The sailors know the boat inside out and worked incredibly hard during the race to keep the boat going in light and variable conditions. Mike Moxley, owner of the HOD Malice, also spoke giving input on conditions for the smaller boats. Though the details were somewhat different, the overall lessons learnt were very similar.

I have uploaded the presentation we used for the evening and you can view this here. Obviously, this will make most sense to people who were there for the evening, but hopefully others will find it useful as well and hopefully it will encourage more people to come to these events in future.

The majority of my time recently has been spent making longer term plans for the BKA - watch this space for more details on dates for the selections as well as news on the future plans, boats etc.

I’ve recently also finished the first year of my Masters, and was really pleased to get a Distinction for my second module and possibly for the year overall.

I’ve got a range of other bits going on as well, including discussions about the possibility of having some involvement with a youth Volvo Ocean Race team, and also continuing my Masters study. This weekend, I’m putting the fact that I am officially a part time student to good use and competing in the university yachting championships!

The first event for all the successful sailors will be this coming weekend, with a personal and team development session along with existing members of the BKA. Much of this will berun  by Ruari Chisholm of the company High Performance Development, who will provide much of the backgroud, while I will put this into practice in designing the programme for next season.

Members of the BKA will sail UKSA’s fleet of J80s as well as the TP52 ‘John Merricks II’.

Full details can be found on the website, including details of how to apply to attend the selections: www.britishkeelboatacademy.org

After a slow start on Friday, we won won three races in a row to leave ourselves well placed in tied fifth place half way through the round robin. On Saturday we had a disastrous day results-wise losing all our matches, despite leading in all but one of them. We had a number of close matches and, ultimately, our lack of time sailing together probably cost us in a couple of situations.

We scraped into the quarter finals starting this morning, drawn against Mark Campbell-James, who has previously been ranked as high as 15 in the world. We therefore knew we were up against it but went into things knowing that if we eliminated some small mistakes we would have a good chance of winning. After a strong pre-start in race one, we let Mark off the hook and started even, but were unable to cross from the left, and we lost by around 20 seconds. In race 2, we again did well pre-start including putting a penalty on the opposition, although we started slightly behind. We tried to keep things close around the course but Mark was just able to complete his penalty on the line to win by around 10 seconds. Mark went on to win the event overall. Mark and I have known each other for several years having sailed together in 2001-2003 on ‘Bear of Britain’, so it was nice to see him still being competitive at this level.