Tenerife PWA WAVE
August 14, 2014Varsovia indoor exhibition event
September 9, 2014Awo Tin Kos !! My first slalom event of the year could not have gone any better for me.
My initial plan at the beginning of this year was to do all PWA disciplines. So when Jordy Vonk offered to borrow me his sails for the slalom event in Turkey I jumped on that offer. When I got to Turkey though I hadn’t sailed slalom for about a year and to make it worse, there was zero wind the whole week I was there before the event. So I could barely practice and get used to the point 7 sails I was going to do that week. Luckily the wind kicked in a bit the day before and I just had time to tune my 7,9 and 110l board together with Arnon Dagan and Jordy.
Contrary to anybody’s expectations we had wind every single day for the duration of the event. I forgot how intense slalom sailing is. We ended up sailing 9 eliminations (1 qualification round and 1 final per round for the women) and by the end of it I was really broken.
I was quite nervous the first day. Because the day before I hadn’t tuned my equipment properly yet and everybody was just flying past me. I’m still amazed at how much effect little adjustments to your setup can have on your overall performance on the water. By the time I needed to do my first race I was flying across the course. I couldn’t believe it.
I managed to keep it together for pretty much all of the races.
Out of the 18 races I did I won 14. Although I was quite fast I had to make sure to have good starts because my jibes were quite sketchy. It took me about 2 days to jibe a bit more smoothly. I was mostly on 7,9 and 110 and used 44cm for light wind and 39cm for a bit stronger wind.
There was just one day where I had the pleasure of sailing 7,2 and 97l. I think I had the most fun there. All of a sudden you feel so much more free on the water as the smaller equipment is easier to handle. During the event we also had a speedchallenge and for every final you would have to take a GPS with you.
So happy to have won that challenge with 61km/h. I feel a new challenge coming on… speed sailing in the future should be fun!
Actually don’t have much to write.. it all went way better than expected!
My toughest competition during this event was Delphine cousine, Lena erdil, Fulya unlu and çagla kubat. I was most impressed by Fulya’s improvement! I’ll be looking out for her next year in Alaçati. Or any slalom competition for that matter. I missed out on turkmenistan but if all goes well I will go and compete in La torche and New Caledonia. Who knows.. If I can keep it up I can still fight for a good ranking in slalom for this year!
My biggest thank you goes out to Jordy Vonk for borrowing me his sails and giving me the opportunity to be at this event and Arnon Dagan for helping me tune everything.
I had such a great time in Alaçati again this year. It was great to be at this competition with the Caribbean crew Ethan, Amado & Taty.
Thank you so much to especially Apo, Irem, Iris, Alara and the ASPC crew. I love this place and you all so much and cannot wait to come back.
Mystic, Starboard