CSailing - Matt Belcher

by Mathew Belcher - OAM #Aus11

We have just completed our first trip over in Europe where we finished 5th in the Princess Sofia Regatta and 10th in the World Cup event in Genova, our worst results in almost a decade. These events marked the start of our European season building towards the World Championships and pre-Olympic event in Japan later in the year. It is fair to say that this was not the start we had hoped for.

The months prior we had really enjoyed the training at SYC and being home. However, coming into Europe we struggled to find the right balance in rhythm and performance. It probably all started from an ‘accident’ we had on our last training day on the Gold Coast. We were coming back into the Gold Coast seaway after a three hour training session. As we were coming back into the entrance in large swell and around 15kts of wind, we were struck by a large breaking wave at the entrance to the seaway. Even with almost 20 years experience of training on the Gold Coast the seaway can surprise you many times, as most of you know. Unfortunately, the wave picked us up and launched us. The boat was severely damaged with every piece of our equipment broken in the process. It also put us in a dangerous situation close to the rock walls where we needed to abandoned our equipment to swim to safety. Will and I were trapped for about 20 minutes with our equipment as the waves rolled us around. Our coach, Victor, attempted to rescue us but the waves proved too challenging and the motorboat capsized as well. Maritime Safety and the Water Police were on the way, but could not get to us due to the swell. In the end it was Kunio (the coach of our Japanese training partners, many of you have probably seen him around the Club) who braved the conditions and managed to pick us all out of the water to bring us to safety. Myself and one of the Japanese sailors were transported to the seaway tower before being off-loaded to the ambulance. I had to spend the night in hospital to rule out any spinal injuries they suspected I might have suffered when being hit by the 470 in the rolling waves.

Due to the swell, the decision was made in conjunction with the Maritime Safety and the Water Police that rescuing our 470 was too dangerous and it was anchored off-shore overnight with jet skis. As you can imagine our equipment isn’t really designed to be left in swell overnight. Over the past two months we are still working through some of this, recovering from injuries and piecing together our equipment again.

I wanted to mention this, as it is a good example of some of the obstacles we face in our campaign environment. It was something you don’t expect to happen but the experience was invaluable for our team and provided another opportunity to come together and learn from this.

It certainly still affected us during our first two European regattas. We have had a very brief break with only a week back home to recollect ourselves, before heading straight back to Europe for our next event, the Europeans in San Remo. However, we are now feeling more confident than the earlier events and are looking forward to putting down a solid performance.

The support of the Club and members has been overwhelming. It has not been the European start we had hoped for but this is part of the business of sport and makes it interesting. Will and I are working hard to come back to our usual level of performance. We continue to push forward each day towards Tokyo2020.

After competing at the Europeans in San Remo I will come home for a couple of weeks and look forward to re-joining the SYC Performance Program.

Until the next update, and thank you again for all the support.