Monday 9 April 2012

Three weekends in a row of sailing is awesome for this time of year. And this weekend was ( drum roll) the first camper van weekend of the year - I have re named it the Devil Van on account of how difficult I find it to drive with any kind of style. In it I feel like a battering ram. The engine is so noisy and uncomfortable with itself (or me?) that even in top gear it sounds like it is on standby to generate electricity for most of the southern hemisphere. It probably uses up the carbon quota of a small country in South America.

I am very excited to announce some signficant progress towards my Olympic goals. First, I bravely ( do something scary every day!) took part in a weekend of learning to sail better in (on?) the Sprint 15 with 4 other sailors of similar quality to me. So similar that I won some races! What a great feeling. So, that is step one on the Olympic campaign. Then this weekend I took part in some club racing, on Saturday ON MY OWN and finished a race. I came last, or 16th, but I DID IT! There was a lot of very calm weather over the weekend, so the races were slow and difficult, it is hard to find the wind and use it when it is not there. Yesterday was great fun as I played in the tippy dinghy rather than the flatter cat, and spent time hanging off the trapeze wire and generally attempting to leap about in a manner better suited to a gazelle than a human. I was sort of getting the hang of the upping and downing of the kite, and I can almost rig and de rig our boat (15) by myself. This is huge progress, I promise. Step 2 complete.

Then today it was raining, so I continued my campaign by watching you tube videos of sailing experts showing you how to do various gazelle like moves in under a second. One which made me laugh was the olympic ladies in their 420 boat they are utterly brilliant and it made me realise just how painfully bad it must have been for my lovely sailing pal Bethan to sail with me at Pwhelli, I knew so little and she is used to so much! I now know which is port and which is starboard and what to do about it and when. So that is step 3 and now I just have to hang around sailing up and down in Weymouth at the right time in August and I might get noticed and stand in for someone who has a cold or something.

As today it has just been raining horizontally I have stayed indoors and done so much tidying and chucking stuff away and cleaning stuff up that it has made my hair curl, in between watching the sailing video tips and entertaining the Crandons for a cream tea. My hair did not go straight in between incidentally as I realise my sentence construction might have made it seem like my hair can straighten and curl at will. Sadly that is not the case although it would be interesting to go on Britain's Got Talent with such talented hair.