Last weekend was the annual Commodores Cup held on Biscayne Bay in Miami, Florida. There were 31 boats from multiple nations competing at this year’s event. The turnout was bigger than usual, but most other nations are in Miami preparing for the world championships next April (which will also be in Miami). Something interesting to note is the next world championship will be the last opportunity to qualify the remaining 4 nation spots for the 2008 Olympics (the US is already qualified). Should be interesting because about 8 really fantastic teams remain not qualified with only four spots left things are going to get intense in South Florida over the next 5 months.
John Dane and I arrived Thursday morning to get two solid days of trainingin before the regatta. (we were due to arrive 5 days sooner but due to business commitments we were late getting in. Our late arrival actually
worked out well, see when we train in one spot for long periods of time we find its better to set up a base camp, this year we rented a fantastic house down the street from the Yacht Club, the house is big enough to house 13 of us and even has a boat dock in the back yard so were able to park our Olympic tender at the house, its very easy and makes things run very smooth.. We are sharing the house with our training partner’s Marc Pickel and his crew Ingo. In addition they have there fitness coach (coach Bismark as we call him) and one other team member, in our camp we had our full time coaching staff on hand for the training and racing. Rod Hagebols and Hans Wallen as well as our conditioning coach Chris Herrera… Needless to say there is a lot of entertainment going on in the house.
Thursday JD and I along with Pickel and ingo headed out to do some testing. For this session we were joined by Hammish Pepper and his crew Tiny Williams(2006 world champion) who sailed Pickel’s 2nd star boat (pickle is actually building his own star boats, called the P-Star we had two P-stars on hand and were testing them both against our folli the rocketship or weapon as I like to call it- 8230) More of the same upwind testing and downwind testing actually very boring for the crew… This pattern continued into Friday as well.
The Racing was great over the weekend we had 5 races over the weekend our score line was 3,1,4,2,3 which was enough to win the regatta by 3 points! I wont bore you with all the details, but bottom line is we were on fire going upwind, it even impressed me how fast we were upwind…. The best part of the weekend for me was knowing about 6-8 other teams will be in China at the Olympics competing against JD and I and we beat them all last weekend!!
Looking forward to the rest of the year off from sailing, staying busy at the office and working really hard in the gym to pack on 12lbs for the Olympics. My wife Sally and I will be heading out to San Francisco to spend the holidays with family and friends, where I will be making a speech at the St.FYC the day after Christmas. Its been a great year, and I looking forward to 2008 being the best year ever!
Believe.
Austin Sperry