Great Lakes Champs

Last weekend, I competed in the Great Lakes Championship held at the Ashbridge’s Bay Yacht Club. There was a storm passing through over the weekend meaning that there was tons of rain and a full range of wind conditions – it felt just like Vancouver! I ended up finishing the regatta in 2nd place behind my training partner, Brenda Bowskill who is representing Canada at the Pan Am games next week.

Over the course of the regatta, I identified a pretty significant weakness of mine, which is getting the boat going fast in choppy waves. It’s funny how much my perspective on something like this has changed, compared to, say, a year ago. Before, the learning curve was so steep that whenever I identified a weakness, it was just one more thing that I had to learn before I could get good. Now, whenever I find something that I’m bad at, I get excited because I see it as an opportunity to make a big improvement to my overall sailing abilities. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve still got a huge amount to learn and still have a significant amount of improvements that I need to make before I can achieve my goals. These improvements, however, are a lot smaller and take a lot more time than before, so it’s always exciting when there is an opportunity to make a bigger gain in less time.

Since the regatta, we have been back training at the Pan Am venue to help Brenda get as familiar as possible with the trends of this location. It has been really useful for me as I have gotten lots of opportunities to work on my upwind boat speed. I’ve also had some really informative discussions on the subject, both with Brenda about what she is focusing on to go fast upwind as well as with my coach Chris Cook. Next week will be my last week of training here in Toronto before I head down to New Jersey for the US Nationals.

Thanks for reading and until next week,

Fillah