During our first weeks of training in Niantic we were pretty conservative. We sailed alone in the afternoon hours. Most of our time on the water we experienced perfect flat water and light to moderate breezes. We concentrated on basic boat handling and simply getting to know the boat. We had great practices just sailing around the bay. Most of the time, we were quiet. We knew what we did right and wrong, and there was only a need for trying things over and over again. The goal in Niantic was to get to know the 470 and get familiar with sailing it in a range of wind speeds. One of our last days before moving to Newport happened on a Wednesday evening in a strong Northeasterly wind (gusts to 25). The Niantic Bay YC Wednesday night racing was going on, so we were happy to go test ourselves knowing there were a lot of other boats around in case something went wrong. We blasted all over the bay, out into Long Island Sound, flipped, righted, jumped into races and back out. We had a blast and put on a show! We truly thank NBYC for supporting our first stage of training.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Welcome!
Hello and welcome to the blog of Team Breault-Williams. Casey and I are aspiring Olympic sailors in the 470 Class. We are the 11th hour special. Here you can follow our progress during five months of intensive training. You may not understand all that you read here, but our purpose is to use this blog as a true window into the minds of Olympic aspirants struggling to master the technically sensitive, yet wickedly fast 470 sailing dinghy. As we begin this blog, we are already well into month three. You may worry that you have missed a lot of our story. However, it is only now that we have gathered enough knowledge to be able to articulate all that we have learned. The curve is steep. It is scary and overwhelming at times. But hang on for dear life, and you too might reach… ludicrous speed!
