After our journey from hell in the French mountains, surely the Gods were going to look on us favourably as we left Palma for France.
Well, it turns out they weren’t. Honestly, we couldn’t make this stuff up….
Here’s a pic of the aftermath:
The upshot is this - 2 days ago we nearly lost the van, the boat and all our worldly possessions in a pretty frightening encounter. In fact, we’re lucky we walked away from this one relatively unscathed. Let’s start from the beginning…
Continue Reading…
Whilst waiting for the ferry to leave Palma we had time to reflect on our first regatta together. Mainly because the queue for the ferry was about 3 hours long. Yes, believe it or not this is actually a queue (see if you can spot Jonny).
It’s easy to have a disappointing result and reflect negatively on the week as a whole. But all the symptoms pointed to the same thing - we lacked boatspeed. Sailing is a simple sport really - all you have to do is start well, hold your lane and wait to tack on the first shift. Do that and 95% of the time you’ll round the top mark in the chocolates.
However, in a fleet as good as the 470, you have big big problems if you lack speed. No matter how good your start, it is only a matter of time before you lose your lane, and then the first beat becomes a fight to find a clear lane. Your strategy is sunk, and you get spat out the back 9 times out of 10. Game over.
It’s an important lesson learned, and not one we plan to sit in on again. Fact: speed makes you a tactical genius. Our priority for the next 4 weeks is to break down the components of boatspeed and begin working on them in bitesize chunks.
Our next port of call is 10 days training in Sanary Sur Mer before the French Spring Cup.
Since our post about the new Zhik Trapeze Harness yesterday, we had a lot of feedback demanding a more close-up photograph of the harness. Like the muppets we are we forgot to take a close-up pic, but fear not, we have managed to uncover a secret photo of the pre-production prototype. You don’t even want to know the lengths we had to go to get this pic…
It’s actually pretty difficult to explain how the velcro works over text, but it’s very self explanatory once you see it. It’s like a ‘double up’ system where you attach the velcro and then double-back on itself, so that there are two layers of velcro holding the harness to your mid-section (we promise to post a YouTube video soon).
A big shout out to Gary from Zhik who contacted us on the back of yesterday’s blog post about the harness. He’s going to do his best to re-aquaint us with the harness before we start the French Spring Cup next week. You legend.
Our performance in Palma doesn’t really deserve its own entry (we posted a very mediocre result, but the only way is up from here!).
So instead, here’s a topic that truly deserves editorial space. We’ve got the inside scoop on this one, this is almost a world-exclusive.
On the Friday of Palma Regatta, amid rumours and feverish speculation, the first batch of pre-production Zhik Trapeze Harnesses were delivered to the Zhik Van in the boat park.
And we managed to blag being one of the first in the world to try it out on the water. Continue Reading…
If you are a sailor and have been on the internet for the past fortnight it will have been hard to miss the launch of Jon Emmett’s new sailing book, Be Your Own Sailing Coach. We say that because every sailing website we go to seems to be featuring it (well done to Jon for a sterling marketing effort on this one!).
Not to mention his Facebook page which has twice as many fans as ours 
But Facebook rivalry aside, we have managed to twist Jon’s arm to give you a free chapter of his book, so here is the link: Continue Reading…
Our last post caused a bit of controversy - we’ve had a lot of people coming up to us and saying things along the lines of “Dudes, you guys are INSANE” and “how did you not got arrested doing that?”.
We chuckled at most of the responses, but some of you were genuinely concerned that we were literally losing our marbles on this trip, hence the reason for this post.
Well, the answer to how we got away with not being arrested will become obvious in a few moments. Continue Reading…
The journey from St Chely to Palma is now over (we’re officially on Palma soil and we even went sailing today). But, the journey wasn’t without incident.
The stormy weather has been on the news over here. Lorries being blown off the road, winter blizzards leaving cars stranded etc etc.
And it was SO windy en route that we had to resort to a more radical approach. Continue Reading…
Well not quite, but we hit 100 fans on our Facebook page today 
I think that means we have officially had too much time on our hands keeping this blog updated while in the mountains.
But today, alas, some good news…
WE ARE OUT OF HERE!
The Slug is fixed, the rabid dog has been uncaged, and we are finally back on the road to Palma.
Only slight problem is that we have 50mph winds to deal with, and a boat on the roof acting as a spinnaker. Then there’s the ice from yesterday’s snow, so still some tests to pass before our feet touch Majorcan soil.
Yes, just when we think it couldn’t get much worse, the last 24 hours have brought further news that warrants a part III of this saga. Continue Reading…
Heaven help those who line up next to us on the start-line of that first race in Palma. We’ve already bottled up a week’s worth of anger and frustration. We’re like caged animals ready to be unleashed on their unsuspecting pray. Yesterday we were even mentioned in the French Press.
We were supposed to leave St Chely yesterday. Continue Reading…
