It's Now or Never: Appleby and Tobutt looking for competition (From Dorset Echo)

It's Now or Never: Appleby and Tobutt looking for competition

3:34pm Thursday 7th February 2013 in Sport

THIS week has seen us take delivery of our new boat, which certainly looks the part.

Up until now we have just concentrated on getting back in the boat and learning how to get from A to B and back again in one piece, hoping that each time we go out, our manoeuvres become a little more instinctive rather than requiring our full concentration.

Now that we have the new boat and feel more comfortable in the boat we want to start looking at what we can do to go as fast as possible.

The boat can be tuned to different set ups for different sailing conditions, ie wind strength so we would like to arrive at the first event with some trialled settings that we can compare in the racing environment.

Our objective over the next month will to be find some other 49er sailors in a similar position to us that we can effectively drag race against them to test different set ups.

This will be an exciting time for us, since up until now, other than passing the odd cruising yacht or a sheltering container ship, we have been sailing by ourselves.

It would be wonderful to think we could work with an already fast pairing but the reality is that it could be a very single-sided relationship with us taking, but having little to offer, in return.

Our goal will to be to sail with another team who we can spar with and help each other get faster through trial and error to a certain extent.

This will be our first chance to gauge our speed and its exciting to have something new to get our teeth into.