Well today is the last day of February and my birthday!
It certainly has been an interesting couple of months with 95% of the time being unsailable with over 40 knots battering the English coastline! Luckily as part of the British Sailing Team we went to Vilamoura in Portugal for 10 days and enjoyed lush weather and incredibly productive hours on the land and sea. Have a look through the photos below detailing my life over the past two months:
Loving the stunning scenery.
Returning home it was straight back to the hard work. Unfortunately sailing was difficult as the English weather had other ideas. Out of the 24 January days I was in Weymouth I was only able to sail 6 occasions! Incredibly frustrating being forced to be sat onshore but at least it meant I was able to hit the gym hard.
Straight after Christmas I went on a family holiday to France. It was an amazing week with the family and was great to relax and unwind for one week of the year!
The bad sailing weather was also a great excuse to put some miles in on the bike and I have enjoyed doing some rides to and from home.
With my boat being packed up and shipped off to Vilamoura in Portugal I brought the Waszp down to Weymouth to ensure I could still get some decent hours in on the water. Despite rarely sailing the Waszp in 2017 I found it to be a very useful addition for my Laser sailing, improving reaction times, hiking and upper body fitness and generally learning more about how a boat should feel to go as fast as possible. It's amazing how easy it is to gybe a Laser in 20+ knots once you've tried foiling gybes at 20 knots in the Waszp!
I was then lucky enough to get a tour round the Selden factory in Gosport by Steve Norbury. Being the new UK supplier of Laser carbon top masts I was incredibly impressed with their quality, efficiency and operations as a whole.
At last the time came to fly out to Portugal for our first overseas training camp of the year. Overall we had stunning conditions (compared to the UK anyway!) and managed to put some serious hours in on the water. It was also great to do a lot of riding, covering almost 200 kilometres over 5 days.
Glamour conditions on the tow.
Returning to the rather chilly UK I hosted my Sam Whaley Sailing Dinner on Saturday 24th February. With over 40 guests it was a great evening with delicious food followed by a presentation on my sailing. It was a huge success all round and I thoroughly enjoyed raising awareness about my sailing and where I want to go. Thank you to everyone who attended and made it an evening I wont forget!
Dinner served at the Sam Whaley Sailing Dinner!
I am also pleased to announce that I am now working with Waterspeed App on development of its mobile applications for watersports.
Waterspeed helps to improve you water sports, using Apple Watch GPS or iPhone to get Instant Speed, Direction angle, best speed average over 10 seconds, Max Speed and more.
I find it very useful for my training and enables me to replay sessions and debrief sessions with greater accuracy and understanding.
Despite sailing in the UK being rather limited I am pleased to have made good progress and am really excited for it to finally warm up (and maybe get slightly less windier!).
Next up for me is travelling to Palma next week to for another training camp before returning a few weeks later for the Princess Sofia competition, which really kicks off the sailing season for me!
In the meantime check out these epic photos which I have just got from the Youth Nationals last year. Really shows that hiking can be fun!
Thanks for reading,
Sam