Dear Race Fans,
Today was a tough day for Team Horton Nichol on Biscayne Bay. We never felt "right" in the boat and finished 22nd out of 91 teams.
While our spirits were high after yesterday's practice session, we knew something wasn't 100% right with our equipment. Perhaps it was some rust from the layoff after our strong performance at the Miami Olympic Classes Regatta in January. More likely, some of our gear was out of whack after the strain we put on the boat in the windy final medal race at the OCR. To complicate matters, we were seeing 40 degree shifts in the north-northeast breeze that was as light as 7 knots and as high as 14 as we tuned up this morning. Two-time Olympic gold medallist and seven-time Bacardi Cup winner Mark Reynolds with his crew Christan Finnsgard sailed an incredible race to take the early lead in the series. There's only one race a day at the Bacardi Cup over six days, so every race is crucial.
Still, in a fleet this competitive, we are not discouraged with our finish. It is good to know that even when we do not have our best boatspeed we can still finish in the top quarter of the fleet. With the quality of the competition, this may not even turn out to be a bad score if the conditions remain shifty the rest of the week. This is not to suggest we are complacent: we postponed eating dinner for a few hours after sailing to take the mast down, check all of our gear and recalibrate all of our numbers. Sure enough, we found a slight discrepancy and are confident that tomorrow the boat will be in the groove.
Today we had our friends and sponsors from LNR Partners, Brad's employer, on the water for LNR Partners Day. It was great to have our friends out there and we hope they will be able to come out again later this week.
Bacardi does not allow the competitors to display advertising during the regatta. Our supporters are a very important part of our success as we campaign towards the Olympics in 2008 so we will be dedicating each day of racing to one of our supporting companies.
Monday is VC Performance Rigging Day. VC Performance Rigging is an Annapolis-based rigging compay run by champion sailors Will and Dave Van Cleef. Dave has devised a number of innovative systems for our boat to save weight and improve performance. Check them out at http://vcrigging.com/
As always, we thank all of our friends and family for their support. Stay tuned the rest of the week for more updates. Monday's preliminary forecast is for lighter, shiftier breezes -- conditions where we feel as though we have an edge.
Andy & Brad
Horton-Nichol 2008
HortonNichol2008@gmail.com
Coming soon! http://www.hortonnichol2008.com/
