Last week, I ran a debrief on the recent St Malo race at RORC in London. There are a number of these race debriefs each year, the idea being to get people together and share ideas about what was successful for a particular race and (hopefully) for everyone to improve their performance going forward.
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.
A busy few months again, including getting the sailing season started and finishing my Masters course for the year. Strong early season performances from the British Keelboat Academy Development squad sailors in J80s at the RORC Easter Challenge, now into the offshore series on ‘John Merricks II’.
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.
Well, it somehow seems to have been over three months since I managed to post any updates here. It has been an incredibly busy winter, however, mainly getting the British Keelboat Academy up and running. I’ve organised training sessions both on and off the water, as well as starting to work out what the future of the whole scheme will look like. All very postive, but plenty to keep my busy! There are more frequent updates on all the BKA activities on the website, Facebook fan page and Twitter.
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!
Last weekend, I ran a selection weekend for the newly-formed British Keelboat Academy. Twenty eight sailors - from over 100 applicants - were invited to UKSA and put through their paces in a range of areas. This included sailing in UKSA’s fleet of keelboats on Saturday, a night orienteering exercise on a wet and windy Saturday night and a number of team working exercises on Sunday. The last of these really allowed us to see the candidates in a completely different environment, operating as different members of a team. At the end of the weekend, twenty sailors were selected to join the BKA and all were given individual feedback on areas to work on to develop their sailing careers.
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’.
Last night I attended the RORC annual dinner, held in the beautiful setting of Banqueting House in London. Several of the sailors from both ‘John Merricks II’ and ‘Chernikeeff 2′ were there to collect trophies for the season. Amy Prime from ‘Chernikeeff 2′ won the Duncan Munro-Kerr Youth Challenge Trophy for the youngest person sailing on a boat finishing in the top three of their class, ‘Chernikeeff 2′ won the Youth Trophy and ‘John Merricks II’ picked up the Europeans Trophy for first overall for the season in class super zero. All in all a sucessful season, and a great night was had by all.