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Qingdao, China
July 2, 2008

After meeting with so many of our loyal supporters at fundraisers before we left home, it’s clear we should tell you more about our daily routine on a typical day while we have been training. We have been here in China for the past 20 days and some teams have returned home for a break while others have arrived. Meanwhile, the Finns, Chinese, Norwegian, French and Australians are our regular sailing partners. The Greeks will be too, but they are still waiting for their boat to arrive and clear Chinese Customs.

Italian dinner with the Chinese team

I mentioned in my last email that we don’t venture out much for dinner, preferring the tried and true food at the hotel. However a couple of days ago the Chinese Yngling sailors invited us out to dinner. Guess what we ate? Italian food! We had a great evening, laughing and learning to communicate because only two of the Chinese sailors speak English and we’re hopeless at Chinese. We celebrated an incredibly early birthday for Debbie and enjoyed the Italian specials suggested by the chef. We joined the women of the official Chinese team, their backup crew, translators and coaches.

Italian diners

On a normal training day, you can find us eating either at the hotel’s breakfast buffet or in the room. We have refrigerators and even cereal from America that we packed to make it easy. After that we head to a morning gym session and then to the boat park, arriving by 10:15 am. Each one of us usually works on ongoing projects for some part of the program. These include sails, boat, rigging, lunch containers, cooling vests, etc. Then we start preparing the boat for the day’s conditions.

We usually have a preset agenda for each day but we always reassess, after checking the weather forecasts as well as simply looking at the current conditions. We also check in with other teams to make a plan for practicing. There are different tuning settings for each wind condition so we get the boat prepared as best we can, prepare the coach boat with spare sails and gear, load the lunch cooler and then start scrubbing the hull to get rid of the growth of marine life that accumulates on the hull overnight.

Coach James Lyne with Debbie and a clean boat

After changing into sailing gear, we hook up the tow and head out onto the bay. Usually our coach James Lyne tows us at high speeds so we need to either throw on our spray tops or hide under the cuddy to avoid being slimed by the green glop we encounter on the way out to the sailing area. At some point on the tow the RIB’s outboard engine overheats due to algae blocking the cooling water intake. After James pauses and clears the weeds we continue.

We practice on the courses we will race on next month – Course Echo offshore, or Course Alpha, the medal race course near the harbour wall. Today it was the inshore course and we and the other two teams that had joined us attempted to race there. Let’s just say it was interesting! Apparently the Olympic organizers chose that area for practice too. We had the entire fleet of support boats setting up around us plus all of the algae-clearing boats and on top of all that, no wind and plenty of current!

We worked hard to stay focused and worked on starting with cross current. Imagine running on a treadmill but it can go sideways and fore and aft. Ocean currents make the starting line extremely difficult. Sally and Debbie do a great job communicating and judging the affect of the water moving at up to two knots, and adjusting the speed of the boat with the sails and our weight so that when the gun goes off, we are perfectly on the line.

We know that every minute we spend on the water is valuable. The current and wind variables are extreme and the more we race the more we train our eyes to make better judgment calls. We were only able to do "one race" this particular day because the current was stronger than the wind but we had a good three hours on the water and then it was back on the tow! This time it was coach Gary Bodie’s slow tow because James stayed out to measure the wind and current to help in the future.

The green dog always points the way home

On the tow we usually have a laugh about the green dog that grows on our towline as we cruise through the slime. The algae problem is the worse in China’s history and now we’re beginning to see small coastal freighters joining the slime fighters. The media reports that over 1,000 boats and 20,000 workers are trying to get rid of the stuff. They have even organized 1,000 students from the local university to join the event. A New York Times report says the Chinese authorities expect to clean it up by July 15. We will see!

Back at the dock, we hose off, fold sails and put the cover on our racing machine. Then I’m off to the gym to do my hour of weights. The gym building is almost finished now except the circular stairs do not have an entrance to each floor so I have to jump over the railing to go to floor two, the cardio floor, or floor three to lift weights! After that, we meet in the executive building for a 6:00 pm session to discuss the day, share information and ideas and learn from the coaches’ observations.

We’re usually in bed straight after dinner, except every night it is quite difficult to go to bed because that’s when everyone in America is waking up and the emails and Skype messages start coming in!

Please spread the word with your friends and fellow sailors to Join the Team to receive our regular updates and, if they wish, to make a donation. Our Join the Team page uses the secure Kintera support software which allows users to sign up for updates, make donations, and easily invite friends and fellow yacht club members to become involved. There is a live display showing a running total of all donations. You can even start your own fundraising team. The current top team is Bee Anderson’s Old Grands. Please check it out.

Carrie Howe

for Team Seven Sailing -
- Sally Barkow, Debbie Capozzi, Carrie Howe