Professional Freestyle windsurfer

Wednesday 18 September 2013

9th place at PWA Holland DAM7!

So after being pretty slack on here for the past 6 months I thought it was about time to get back into keeping this page a bit more updated. After feeling pretty excited about my result from the last event in Holland this finally gave me some motivation to start writing again.

Being the first PWA event in Holland for a long time it was great to go somewhere and have no pre conceptions about the event or conditions etc. I drove over there together with Gollito and Josh Willmot from Blacklab. It only took us three hours to get to Brouwersdam from Calais so its pretty feasible to head there from the UK on a good forecast. The forecast for the event was a bit all over the place at the start of the week but it help up and gave us some pretty epic conditions, I was praying for it to be mega windy 4.0 weather as thats when i felt I could do my best. I ended up sailing all my heats on the new 4.4 North Idol ltd which after seeing the full power conditions that some of the guys had to sail in wasn't a bad compromise at all....  For the finals of the single elimination it must of already been around 40kts and once they were done with that they decided to run the first round of the double elimination and by this time it was much nearer 50kts!! Luckily enough for me I'd advanced far enough in the single to be waiting in the third round of the double for my heat. I was sat in the van watching together with Bubble and all though we had both been praying for full power conditions we were pretty happy to be sat in the van as some of the guys were struggling to land more than a couple of moves!!

The following day the conditions were a lot more bearable and I was back out on my 4.4! After beating Yarden Meir who's one of my favourite guys on tour to watch sail as you never know whats coming next I then went on to face Niko Agkazicyan in the battle for 9th place. I'd never beaten Niko before so I knew I was going to have to sail my best to stand a chance! I was reading all the messages of encouragement from the boys in Vass in between my heats and this got me feeling more focused and relaxed than I've ever felt in a heat before. Feeling that relaxed meant that I went on to sail one of my best heats of the contest and it was a very close decision but I just managed to edge past him. After that I was up against Youp Schmit again another top sailor! This time I think I should of gone into the heat with a bit more belief that I could go further, the excitement of already being 9th distracted me from what I needed to do to beat Youp. He sailed unbelievably and went on to finish the event in 5th.

Overall I'm really happy with the result, especially as it almost guarantees me a spot in the top 16 for this year. The top 16 is so tight this year that it wasnt quite enough to move me up any further but fingers crossed if I get another good result in the next event in Sylt I will be able to discard my 16th place from Fuerteventura! For the moment its actually nice to be spending a week at home so I can chill out a bit before the next contest. We've even had some sick conditions here! Check out this Skopu clip from the other day at The Ray in Southend!

Single Elimination
Double Elimination