Zander Kirkland wrote on he and his brother Jesse’s website, I wrote this for a NHYC write up, but it brings to light a few interesting things we have picked up on.
"We first sailed Kiel Week in mid June, an ISAF Grade 1 event in Northern Germany, where we battled with a tough 59 boat fleet. The event was mired with light airs and was a little disappointing that there was not as much sailing as hoped. Still, the first day was windy and we completed three windy races which was invaluable practice as our time in breeze is still limited and every race day in breeze moves us along on the learning curve. It was apparent that we were out of practice after our spring hiatus - to allow Jesse to graduate - but we are not worried about results at this early juncture, only learning and underlying performance. In this boat, racing is the best practice you can get! We ended up in Kiel, a very humbling 50th place, a reminder of how much work we have to do to get to the World Standard”.
We then packed it all up (49er on top of the rental car) and headed 10 hrs east to Gdynia, the sailing capital of Poland for the 49er European Championship. The European Championship is arguably more competitive than the World Championship because the heart of the class lies in Europe and this championship is always very well attended. The Bro's had the same goals for the European Championships as for Kiel Week, to log focused hours in the boat and continue to keep on learning as much as possible. With our amount of time in the boat to date, results were not a priority. Yes, we wanted to do well and have our moments up in the fleet, but we were realistic about our chances with a fleet of professional sailors. We wanted to do well at everything we could control (ie. tactics, starts, etc), but were cognizant of the fact that their boat handling would let them down at times.
The 82 boat fleet was stacked: full of World Champions, Olympic Medalists, professional big boat sailors and top skiff sailors. We pretty much had every condition over the 6 days of racing: everything from puffy, offshore conditions, to big waves associated with a sea breeze, to light air - great practice for us, but also extremely tiring after 3 days straight of solid breeze. We had some good starts, some good first beats, some solid second beats, some fast mark rounding’s, some good upwind and downwind speed, but we never really had the consistency to put it together for a complete race. This we believe is a symptom of our lack of time in the boat relative to our competition. After the dust settled, we ended up in 68th place (14th in Bronze), once again a rather lowly position to find ourselves in, but you have to earn your place in this fleet and up until now we could not put the time in. However, it was great immersion training and has stoked our fires to train hard to move forward from here.”.
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