Sailing Magazine
Two South African sailors, Calvin Gibbs and Megan Robertson, are competing in this event.
Rob Holden reports:
Team RSA arrived at the youth Olympic Village at 17h00 yesterday after a long flight to Hong Kong and a 2 hour delay on the apron at Hong Kong. The SASCOC team has been great in their organisation and dealing with problems. They always go beyond the call of duty to assist us if we have problems. Each code manager gets a sim card from the Organising authority but these are the old style big sim which does not work in most of our phones so SASCOC hired some cheap phones that can work with the sim and gave these to us – this is an example of what I mean by going beyond.
The sailing venue is a 2 hour bus ride from the village so we all had breakfast at 07h00 and got on the first bus at 08h10. There was a problem on the freeway so we sat for another half hour in traffic, but eventually got to this purpose built facility on Lake Jinniu and the facility is very nice.
It has been raining most of the time since we arrived, but we could assemble the boats in the big tents that are on site. The really hard job was to stick huge country codes and flags on our sails, but when this was done we managed to get in a shakedown sail. We left the venue at 17h00 to arrive at the village at 19h00. It is great that our busses are escorted by police as we really feel special.
The city is filled with posters and billboards on the games and there are thousands of volunteers who show you where to go and what to do.
Today we will start off going through the boat so the sailors understand exactly what each control does to the sail, then we will spend as much time on the water as possible to get used to the boat. We have 3 days of practice before the serious stuff starts.
