The sail racing in Boston was perfect. The wind was light, but absolute fine for racing. We had a great organization and thousands of sailing fans every day at the promenade of the Fan Pier. It was real Extreme Sailing at its best in Boston. The pictures are speaking for themselves.
But it was not the week of Team Extreme. Mostly everything went wrong for us at the Series in Boston. We had massive problems to speed up with the spare boat we got after the crash with Team Alinghi in Istanbul.
We were so happy to continue sailing in Boston with another boat and the Team from OC helped us a lot to get us on the water. They send a boat especially for us from the UK to Boston. But somehow we were not able to get the boat running well. On top of this we made wrong tactics and bad moves on the water. But this happens, if you need to change the boats.
We tried it all with different trimming of the boat. We tried to compensate it with more extreme tactics. But we failed and we are very frustrated. Sometimes this happens in sailing competition. Not always it’s going fast forward. This time we sailed backwards.
We got a great US sailor on board with Robert Merricks, who won a silver medal at Sydney Olympics in the 470 class. He performed very well as bowman and gave us a great input to our team. We wish we were able to give him a better result.
Yes we won one race and we had some more highlights. But overall we performed not so well. We will analyze our mistakes and we hope to come back with a new boat in Cowes (6-12. August) for the next Extreme Sailing Event.
Yours, Team Extreme