The fight continues

The past few days have been amazing training. The breeze was only very big one day, but there is always more than enough for 1 solid 3-4 hour session per day. Although we (us and Gordo) don’t have a coach, we’ve been keeping it pretty structured. In the morning, we discuss what we want to do, and then come up with usually 3 pretty heavy drills. Gordo has over 10 years of full on training, and even more of sailing these boats, so he has a large inventory of effective drills for almost any goals. We also make up or alter existing ones to suit our goals, and it has been working out great. Dan and I go to the gym for an hour before we meet at the boat park each morning (I still haven’t worked off all of that British cuisine), and we’re training hard during the day on the water, but for some reason we are way more exhausted in the evening when we come in then we feel that we should be, and we can’t figure out why. Today, we drank a 1.5L of water each before we went sailing, and then an additional 3L between us on the boat! It is extremely hot and muggy here, and we don’t really stop for the 4 hours we’re on the water, whereas when we’re racing, we’re waiting for the same amount of time that we’re actually working. Tomorrow i’m going to smash down a pile of bananas as well!
Now for the fight part. We were doing up a budget for Miami, and we found that we will have to invest about $10 000 CAD into our existing boat in order to get it ready for the annual World Cup kick off and Canadian Sailing Team qualifier. After running the numbers by Gordo, and some other 49er guys around, it seems that although we have a nice boat, it’s an old style boat, and due to the new design, if we wait another year to sell it, we will surely have to take off $5 000 of the value and selling price, because more and more people are going through new boats, and putting them on the market. If we invest $10 000 into this thing now, which does nothing to its market value in 2011, and we have to wipe 5K off of it next year when we have to sell it anyways, we are throwing away 15K…in 12 months! Justin and I sat down last night on the phone and broke down the costs, and compared our options. If we can sell this thing for a fair price now, and order a new boat within 2 weeks, and share shipping costs with the rest of the national team who are all buying new ones for Miami, we will pay only $1500 over what we need to invest in our old boat to get it race worthy. We have a 2007, and it is softer, slower, and heavier than a new design, carbon fibre 49er. The fact is that it is just an impossible expense right now to buy before selling, so I now have just a few hours short of 13 days to sell this boat. She’s already posted on 49er.ca, and 49er.org, but i’m also going to send personal emails to every damn sailor in North America, and i’m going to click that little red (!) before I hit “send”. Whoever buys the boat better take care of it like we did!