If you ever want to do a major international regatta, don’t even think twice – just do it, it’s so awesome. Thankyou to everybody who encouraged and supported me along the way and helped my family with all those silly but have to know questions before we went – you were all so right – a special thankyou to Scotty, Peter Conde, and Al from Seaway Marine.
The experience of going to a World Regatta on the continent was mind blowing, the venue and the clubhouse was like Lake Cootharaba, but smaller and older. All the teams arrived with their coaches and entourages in huge Ford Transit Vans packed up to the max, towing huge made up trailers to hold their rubber duckies on the bottom with anything up to 8 lasers on the top. Then they all tried to offload in the same small carpark, consequently there were a lot of arguments and fights, as well as on the beach, the measurement, the start line, the scoreboard and of course the football – that was awesome to, we were in France while they got to the top – what a buzz. Well now I have landed back with a bit of a thud, I have 6 assignments due in the next two weeks, and I finally now have some time and access to the internet to let you know where I’m up to and what has happened over the last few weeks. It was really hard not having access to the internet to let you all know what was happening. I met so many new friends and travelled to so many new places and even went in and out of 11 airport systems and watched heaps of new movies on the planes. I travelled by plane, train, metro, bus, taxi, car hire, chauffeur, ferry and ate lots of new foods. Paris was fantastic, there was an annual music festival the night we arrived with concerts and bands all over the city, I even saw an organ repertoire at the Notre Dame! (that’s the cultural side of me). Then the trip was finished off with a surreal experience when I was a finalist at the Yachting Australia awards. That was such an honour, to meet such amazing yachtsmen, and VIP’s and Princess Anne as well, I still can’t believe I went to such an evening. I’m having break at the moment, trying to catch up on schoolwork and vegging a bit – I’ll be back sailing this week – CU all soon.