Euro Champs Report One

New Zealand Euro Opti Team Report

Kia ora from sunny and hot Poland!

After initial travel dramas our team is settled into our base in Kamien Pomorski, Poland. We have joined forces with the Australian team, Caralina and Tom to make the Australasian team of 6. We had our first day at the regatta site yesterday. Our persuasive manager talked the hotel staff where we are staying into driving our team to the venue over an hour earlier than the official transport time. Once there our team got their boats – the charter boats are all Blue Magic and our kids love them. Ken purchased a new J Sail and Zak got to rig his new North Sail for the first time. After about an hour and a half of setting up the children launched for the first time.

Susannah worked them hard in their first session with four hours of testing the local conditions and getting up to speed with their new sails and boats. The highlight of the day came when the children joined the Polish team of 14 children to practice racing. Our team was competitive with Tom getting a second in one of the races.

Off the water the team then proceeded to measuring which was a 1km walk away. We were totally prepared for this to be a long drawn out process as we had heard of dramas from previous years. This year the measuring was a dream with Jack being the quickest of our team getting measured within 5 minutes. The biggest drama was getting the bow stickers on smoothly without bubbles – Caralina managed to go through four stickers! Lucky the head measurer had an easy going personality and thought this was funny.

The team has a fine system running for any bad language and silly incidents that happen. Ellie and Zak have taken over the role of chief policemen for this silly!! Our team manager, Mike, leads the swearing fines J The fining session over dinner has become a highlight.

We have 3 days now before the regatta begins so we will be spending the time getting used to local conditions and becoming more familiar to our surroundings. We are looking forward to a trip with the other teams on Friday to a Viking Village not far from here.

:-)

http://www.europti2010.pl/ Tracking of races is available from this site

http://jantinetti.blogspot.com/ Jan's blog