Peter Cope Start of Season Update
Peter shares with us his experience at the Start of Seasons Championship.
It has been a busy start to the year so far for me. On 16 and 17 March I was down in Weymouth at an Athena Waszp U25 team training camp with two days of solid training which were really good for honing my skills before the Start of Seasons Championship the next weekend with the elite team.
The Start of Seasons Championship was held at Datchet Water just outside of London. The conditions for the first day were atomic with the biggest gust of the day clocking in at 35 knots, even causing one race to be abandoned! After a poor first race the rest of my results were consistent, leaving me in third place at the end of day one. We completed 8 races on the first day over a short course format and the racing was very intense. The second day gave us more moderate conditions with a wide range of wind strengths. I started well over the longer course format finishing second by mere seconds and then finished 4th, 5th and 4th in the remaining races and came in 3rd overall.
After an intense sailing event, it was great to be back home for the Easter weekend. I went up to Ramsey Sailing Club for their Easter regatta. In the handicap fleet I won the first race but then had a few technical issues in the second and third races of the regatta and unfortunately I dropped to 4th place overall. It was a fun event and the conditions were great with big waves and wind and the turnout was great too, with fifteen boats.
I will be focusing on my A levels over the next couple of months and don’t have any sailing events planned. However I’ll still be training hard, honing my skills and working on my fitness level ahead of the 2024 WASZP World Championships in Sandefjord, Norway in August where I will be competing against 180 of the best WASZP sailors in the world! I am also entered into the Norwegian National Championships at the end of July, also at Sandefjord, which will be great opportunity to prepare for the big event.
I would like to thank RL360 for their ongoing support which helps me to compete at these events.