40 boats entered. Different brands present: Bimare, Blade, Cirrus, Falcon, Nacra and Viper, with good numbers of every design.
Belgians, Dutch, German, French, Swiss,… a lot of nationalities fighting for European title, with some Olympic teams in the mix too!

Yesterday and Saturday we could participate in a local race, and the Sunday part would then be considered the practice race for the Europeans. On Saturday approximately 20 boats entered and we had a nice first race, single trapeze conditions. The second race was in even lighter conditions and you had to carefully pick your shifts. After these 2 races, wind dropped even more and racing was cancelled for the rest of the day. On Sunday we had more boats ready to sail, but the wind was so light, we all just drifted to the starting area. Once arrived we had 10 minutes of nice steady sailing, but then the wind dropped again. We started nonetheless but after a couple of minutes of sailing to the upwind mark, the wind shifted again and we had to pull the kite while others still were having upwind wind conditions. This wasn’t a race anymore. So the racing committee unfortunately had to cancel all races for that day. Getting back in again was even more difficult and in the end everybody ended up being towed in. I hope Lago di Como, will be nicer to us the coming days!

After the price giving the F16 Europeans got their official kick-of with some very nice Italian food and drinks. Great way to start the week. And let’s hope we’ve had the “no wind” now over and done with and we can race the whole week. Yesterday evening we had some thunderstorms again and rain, and according to some this means we won’t have thermal winds in the afternoon. Fingers crossed!

Gill