back in singapore… for exams!!

We’re back in Singapore now and exams start in 1 and a half week’s time. Exams and I don’t go very well together. But anyway, I’ll study. I PROMISE. Come to think of it, I don’t have problems with Exams.. i just have problems with Results.

In summary, the racing at ASC was super fun. Racing is always fun anyway. There was all sorts of conditions, from very very light to very very strong. Flat water to huge swells. We’ve come out of this regatta with a direction, knowing which areas to focus on in our training the next 2-3 months. Mostly need to work on heavy wind stuff. But before we do, we need more weight and more strength.

The helm of the winning Chinese 470 women’s team could not believe that Dawn’s crew is smaller than her. I need weight, and I need it quick. I need height too, but.. sigh. Move on.

Will be a busy 3-4 weeks before school holidays when we can focus all our energy on selections. We’re excited!!

Heard it’s been raining almost everyday here in Singapore, while we were away. Hope the weather gets better and I can go cycling again soon.. Home sweet home.

second in the medal tally!

Here we are on the other side of the regatta. Our final race proved to be the strongest-wind race of the entire series, with over 20knots blowing and the waves larger than ever before.

(See what I mean? Now you see us … now you don’t!)

On port tack, going straight into the waves, there are times you go up a mega-monster wave and know you’re going to launch off into the air and slam back down. How to prepare for this if you’re on the wire? Take a tip from Siobhan: once you see the wave coming, grab your helm.

We went into the race sitting in third with a two-point lead over our nearest competitors, the Japanese. So all we had to do was keep within a place of them to keep our bronze medal. It turned out to be an exciting race (not as harrowing as our medal race last year): we started off with a good lead, but on subsequent legs, a shaky rudder and spinnaker mishaps allowed them to chip away.

It became pretty close on that last loop, with our own fifth-placed Singaporean team-mate joining the fray, too. But in the end, we finished right on the Japanese’s hip!

Team Singapore has finished second in the medal tally, with 2 golds, 2 silvers and 4 bronzes. The breakdown:

Gold
420 Boys: Justin Liu/Sherman Cheng

Laser Radial Open: Koh Seng Leong

Silver
420 Girls: Rachel Lee/Benita Chua

Keelboat Match Racing: Maxi Soh/Xu Yuan Zhen/Alvin Hong/Andrew Chan/Ko Chuan Yang

Bronze
470 Women: Dawn/Siobhan (i.e. us)

470 Men: Roy Tay/Terence Koh

420 Girls: Daniella Ng/Cheryl Yee

Optimist Girls: Kimberly Lim

Several fourths and fifths as well, so all in all, a good outing for the whole team!

We managed to finish our container packing in record-quick time, so we came into Guangzhou to spend the night in the city before our flight home tomorrow. Soon, we’ll be home!

cold fronts passing!

It has been a very cold couple of days racing. (Case in point: I’m currently wearing four layers of clothing!)

Yesterday was perhaps the coldest, with the wind chill in 15-20 knots of breeze. Today, preparing for another cold day, warm clothes passed round from those who have extra to teammates in need. Sherman lent Siobhan his super-power spray top (fleecy inside).Turns out it was so good, she had to take it off after the first race because she was too hot!

The waves here are massive! Even in the innermost course, where the Optimist are, there are huge rolling waves up to 2 or 3 metres. Some of them curl off at the top, looking very much like mini tsunamis.

We 470s and 420s are, of course, way further out. Lots of swells, but not so many breaking waves. So now instead of the fog making it hard to see the marks, it’s the waves that obscure them. Some advice: don’t bother looking for the mark when you’re not at the top of the wave!

It’s also not very fun sailing an hour upwind back to shore after racing in strong wind! Yesterday a Malaysian 470 sailor collapsed upon arriving at shore and the helpers started doing CPR. Scary stuff!

There’s two more days of racing to go. If you’re in Singapore reading this, please go outside and absorb some sun then send it to us!

out of the fog

It seems that every regatta just has one of those days where AP over A ends up flying for the day. Yesterday, fog and lack of wind kept us waiting on shore until half past three, when the race committee finally decided to can it for the day.

Here’s what it looked like in the morning when we got to the boat park:

And looking from the top of the launching ramp down and out to sea:

The weather did a complete 360 overnight and this morning, instead of waiting under AP in the windless heat, we had 30 knots going out on the race course and 15 degrees … so it became a wait for the wind to die.

Which it did, thankfully, so we’re two more races in now. I don’t think the results are updated online just yet, but they should be here soon enough!

from 20knots to 2

We’ve been out sailing three days now. First was registration, measurement, and our first on-water session – long day, with 20kts of breeze in the afternoon. Yesterday we had the practice race, in what seemed like only 2kts at times!

While we were getting our boats set up, Brett Beyer, wildlife photographer, was hard at work taking shots of the ‘animals’ in the boat park.

Including this one, which he says makes our 4.7m dinghy look like a 40-footer.

We had to launch the powerboats sans tractors, too.

The sea of red isn’t just Singapore sailors, though. There are tons of Chinese volunteers. The launching ramp is really steep, and when we first saw it, I thought damn, it’s not going to be fun pulling the boat up that.

Well, the sheer number of volunteers makes recovering up that ramp a piece of cake!

Racing started today and we’ve kicked off with a third. Only one race got finished today because the fog got too thick – honestly, the second race was a visibility nightmare. There was some confusion with whether we actually managed to finish (and first!) before they abandoned the race. Result: we spent the rest of the evening in the protest room awaiting a redress that didn’t come out in our favour. Oh well, that’s sailing.

china doesn’t block wordpress. yet.

We’re here in Shanwei, Guangzhou after starting our travels early, 6am at the airport this morning. From there, we had a 4-hour flight, a 3-hour wait at the airport, then another 4-hour coach ride to get to our accommodation. By then it was dark, so we haven’t had a chance to look around. It does look as though we’re in the middle of nowhere, though. The bus went over 20 minutes of gravel road getting here. (Not good for bus-sickness!)

We’ve learned that we will be very secure here, given the police check we had to go through. They erected a stand with one of those airport security scanners and made us pass through with our bags. Problem was, the baggage scanner was too small for our luggage, so they insisted that we line up our suitcases and open them for the police officials to look through!

Fortunately, after a few bags frisked, they decided it was too much hassle and reasoned that we had just come straight from the airport, i.e. our bags had just come out of airport security.

So we lugged our suitcases back onto the bus, trooped back on board, and rode to the hotel … 20 metres around the corner.

And those are our adventures in Shanwei so far.

Tomorrow is a big day, with registration, measurement, rigging up, and our first launch here all in one. So I shall hit the post button now and hope this goes online. It took so many tries to hit this page that I wondered if WordPress was among one of those sites blocked by China national Internet security or something!