Saskia Clark blog update: Silver in Hyeres

470 Silver for Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark at French Olympic Sailing Week © Richard Langdon / Skandia Team GBR

Fresh from finishing in 2nd place in Hyeres, the fourth leg of the ISAF World Cup Sailing Series, Saskia Clark gives us her thoughts on the event and the first medal for the new 470 Team…

Getting hit by a coach boat and ending up with a big hole in your boat is never the ideal way to start a regatta, especially as Hannah and I were pretty focussed on getting a good start to Hyeres to improve on our last performance.

So we were delighted we overcame all the issues that go with such a setback to pick up our first ISAF World Cup series medal together, a silver, last week.

To say we were gutted on day one is an understatement. Palma [the Princess Sofia Regatta] hadn’t gone as well as we hoped and we worked really hard in the two weeks between regattas to try to improve on the certain elements, particularly starts and our upwind communication, we felt had let us down in Palma. Palma was our first event together and I think we were so swept along with the excitement of the new partnership and training that we overlooked some of the more mundane, but crucial, racing processes, which cost us in the event. Saying that, Palma was still very important in learning all those processes and getting to know each other better.

We had a good few days’ training in Hyeres prior to the regatta and were really fired up to get on with it. When we got hit by a coach boat just before the start of race one, it felt like everything was conspiring against us! We quickly tried to do a bit of a makeshift repair job in the minutes before the start and there was duct tape everywhere. We actually got off to a good start in race one but the hole was on the left-hand side of the boat and as soon as we tacked onto port we got slower as the boat started taking on water. We retired from the race and tried a better repair for race two, managing to get round in 26th, but our only chance of getting any sort of result from the regatta was to seek redress through protest.

Even if you think you have the most clear-cut case going into a protest you can never be entirely sure whether the jury are going to find in your favour. Hannah dealt with the protest while Peter Bentley (Skandia Team GBR Technical Projects Manager) helped us repair the boat, always a slightly stressful experience in the dying light, and heat of a boat park when you are trying to get epoxy to go off! The jury came to inspect the damage before making their decision and could see the big hole, so we were pleased to take the redress of the average of our scores from the next three days’ of racing.

How we coped with this setback really pleased me. Although day one was quite breezy, the wind then died off and we discussed that it was going to be a high scoring regatta so the most important thing would be consistency. At the start of each day we gave ourselves a target of what we thought would be good results for the day and concentrated on that. Our two redress results for Sunday were going to be the average points of the following three days’ racing so it was really important for us not to get an OCS and stay out of the protest room. Most of the starts went off on under a black flag so we paid a lot of attention to our position and communication on the start line.

By the end of the regatta we had won silver with an average placing of 10th, which is surprisingly high showing how high scoring everybody was. We were pleased with how we sailed over the series and how we achieved the daily goals we set for ourselves. It’s also Hannah’s first senior medal in a 470 and our first ISAF World Cup Series medal together, which is great for confidence.

We are not about to start getting carried away by all this though. The Spanish pair [Pacheco and Betanzos] won gold with a day to spare and a 40 points margin, so there is still a very long way to go for us. It is only a month until the Skandia Sail for Gold Regatta at Weymouth and Portland, which is a massive event for most nations, especially all the British teams, and we will be working hard at the venue to carry on improving on the things that we made progress with between Palma and Hyeres. It is going to be a full-on month on and off the water for us but it is all part of the exciting challenge of being considered for 2012 selection.

Saskia

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