Ashley Stoddart World Event

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

Hello again,

I’ve just come back from Miami, Florida, for the ISAF Sailing World Cup Regatta – Miami OCR.

Being my first big trip away without my parents I travelled over with my coach Fletch and stayed with the Women’s Match Racing girls. It was a very cool experience, where a greater responsibility of organisation became mine, it was a lot of fun!

The few days training before the regatta, was really enjoyable, with diverse conditions. In training we took the first opportunity after having the 5 regattas over the summer to work on a few key techniques and then mainly did some short course racing with at least half of the fleet (mostly the better girls).

In the regatta which carried out over 5 days, with 10 races in total, the conditions were good to gather experience . The wind came off the shore in every day’s racing, and became especially tricky on the last 3 days of racing with very chilly winds becoming more unstable as the land warmed up early morning. There was one windward, of a race, where the fleet was tacking on shifts every 5-10 seconds, yet the next windward would be a persisting shift to the left for example. The racing was always very close, in one race about half the fleet crossed the finishing line at the same time, making it difficult for the race committee to assign the placings.

I finished 27^th overall in the regatta, but had many top 10, first mark roundings, and placed 8^th in race 2. There was no shyness of talent in our fleet with representation from 25 countries and 58 competitors.

To me the regatta was a success, I was able to build from mistakes I made in the Nationals and Youth Nationals held in Australia, and highlight the areas which still need improvements. I have just under 2 months until my next competition in Japan, which is a Youth event, so this gives me a nice block of training.

Overall the trip was a major encouragement for me, and a whole lot of fun also. (Miami beach certainly has many different characters and is much like the movies)

Thanks again, for following my movements and helping me in every way you can!

Kind regards,

Ashley Stoddart

Member of the Australian Sailing Development Squad

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