2009 ISHARES CUP SUM UP 22 Oct 2009 // 13:57

Overview.

Well I guess the year was well worse than we originally expected...sure the bottom fell out of the economy forcing us to tighten our belts but we still managed to piece together a nice package which we thought was in for a good show.

One thing that we chose to skimp on was sails and training time due to the substantial costs that we could not cover within our budget..these were two big mistakes..we thought that we, as a team, could continue to sail a variety of other craft to stay sharp and just come together for the event weeks. It became very clear early that this was not going to work as there are not too many boats around that require the same skill set as the X40.

I think this has been our biggest let down for the year and if we had our time again we would have pushed for more time together on the boat. Not a lot came together for us as a team on the water and we only managed a hand full of individual race wins all year.

Sails was also regrettable..sail shape and performance deterioration is measurable by digitizing the sails cords off photos. I was very surprised at how quickly our headsails lost their performance design shape..we ended up absolutely exhausting our whole inventory and finished the season using a rented headsail of Mike Golding (Ecover) and our 3 season old mainsail..the knock on from this was a speed problem right from the beginning of the year.

Having said the above, the team were amazing..never dropped their heads and just kept continually looking for solutions and supporting each other. It was a tough year and none of us like getting a beating on the race course. We hopefully wont be in the same situation again next year and be able to run with the pack.

I am regularily asked if I would do the series again and my answer today is 'yep, I don't want to finish my time in this class with a 6th place over all as our signing off result...and besides, what else would we race..these boats and this series are awesome!'

Cheers

Nick