With competition at the Tornado World Championship set to start on Tuesday 5 December, we spoke with sailor Will Howden to see how he and helm Leigh McMillan have prepared for the event that lies ahead and what they make of the conditions out in San Isidro, Argentina.
Leigh and I are out here in Argentina, sailing out of the home club of Santiago Lange and Carlos Espanola, the Olympic Bronze medallists for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. We are sailing on a huge river and are based at the inland end which is about 140 miles from the ocean, is 30 miles across and to the North of us is Uruguay. The water level rises and falls without too much notice and has a range of over three meters. When it gets up to three meters the boat park and club house are under water!
Most of the time there is very little water out on the race course and the other day we were touching the bottom with our centre boards with only a hundred meters distance between us and the course, luckily it is mostly mud.
The mud turns the water a very cloudy brown making the wind very hard to see, with the shallow depth kicking up a very short chop in the strong breezes.
We have now been here for 10 days and have seen most wind conditions for zero to 25 knots, with one evening the wind getting up to 35 knots blowing water in from the ocean and causing a few people to move their boats to higher ground due to the flooding in the boat park.
The general sailing breeze is shifty; at times showing a pattern but when you think you have worked out the shift pattern it throws in a curve ball and goes 30 degrees the other direction!
All in all this is a really hard place to sail, and with everyone on the top of their game this is going to be one of the hardest Worlds to date with realistically six or seven teams able to win.
Last year we finished second at the Tornado Worlds in La Rochelle, so our main goal is to better that result. Our training up to this event has been really good with a superb winter series conducted in the UK, which included taking gold at the UK National title and at the inaugural Skandia RYA Sail for Gold regatta among others.
Our warm up event here in Argentina at the Tornado South American Championships didn t go as well as we had hoped, with some damage to our new mainsail causing us to retire from one race and then miss the 3rd race of the day.
This has now been fixed and after a day of rest we are back training and making our final preparations for the Worlds.
Check back later in the week to hear Will s account of the World Championships as the event progresses.