From the 18th to the 25th of August Chris and I were in Weymouth preparing for the UK National Championships which were to start on the 23rd for 3 days of racing.

We arrived down at Weymouth on Monday afternoon to rig the boat up for sailing on Tuesday, we spent the afternoon rigging up in gale force winds and rain, which wasn't pleasant, but managed to get it all done and head home ready for training the next day. We arrived down the academy on Tuesday morning to find some big winds, so planned an aerobic session and some boat maintenance. The forecast for Wednesday wasn't looking that brilliant either but it looked that an early sail would be our best opportunity to get out on the water.

We managed to get fairly windy sail in on Wednesday morning with the Finnish and German teams this gave us an opportunity to get back into the boat and refine some boat handling we were working on in previous training sessions. The forecasts were much better for the Thursday and Friday and there was open training organised so there was the possibility of doing some more racing with more boats around.

We did some racing on Thursday and Friday then polished the hull ready for the nationals starting the next day.

The nationals started with a nice 10-14 knots, we were conscious to keep our results consistent, we started off with a 7th after a bad start we sailed well to climb back up, in the second race we had a good start and held our lane all the way out to the left and rounded 2nd with pressure from behind we just managed to hold off and hold onto 2nd. In the last race of the day we were out of sync with the shifts and didn't make much ground through the fleet finishing 15th.

Day 2 graced us with slightly more wind 12-16 knots we sailed 4 races and kept focused on consistency we had some average starts but sailed very well to claw them back up to good results we ended the day with a 4, 7, 5, 6. Which left us 5th overall with 2 races to go and the Germans 4 points behind us, the forecast for Monday was fairly windy so consistency could be hard.

We turned up on Monday morning and sure enough it was a fresh 18-23 knots and we were looking forward to the days sailing. In the first race we showed good speed and managed to get round to finish 4th and the Germans finished 11th. This meant that there would be another discard after the last race which meant we had secured 5th and could possibly take 4th. In the last race we were inside the top 7 with good pace and then we capsized on a gybe which meant we finished 11th. Although we have been doing a lot of windy boat handling it shows we still have to do so we can do exactly want we want in the big winds.

We now have a week at home and the a week training with Chris Draper (Olympic Bronze medalist Athens 2004) and some more training before possibly our biggest event of the year and our 1st qualifying event for funding at Sail for Gold. Where we must be top 4 non performance squad boat.