THE year is rapidly disappearing before our eyes as we try to get as much time on the water as possible before it really gets cold.

Lots of other teams have been disappearing off to warmer climates to continue their winter training and, while we are slightly jealous, it hasn’t been too bad here so far.

The lack of daylight is probably more of a challenge than the temperature at the moment, so we are getting used to packing the boat up in the dark by torchlight.

We didn’t help ourselves one day this week by sailing out into the bay to practice in choppier water and completely underestimated how long it would take to get back.

It wasn’t totally dark when we got back but we did cut it a bit fine. It is actually quite nice sailing at dusk but we need to respect the rules of the harbour and be safe, so will be more careful in future.

How quickly time is passing was highlighted when I met up with Joe Swindell from Certatraining.co.uk earlier in the week.

As we have talked about before, Joe helps a variety of people and organisations reach their potential through having the right focus, goals and mental preparation.

We spent time talking about the key events for us through 2014 and the goals we want to set ourselves.

Working back from this, we can plan how we will use our time most effectively.

This is a really useful process but slightly scary when you realise that there really isn’t that much time before we will be competing again and we really want to up our game next year.

It was also helpful to have an objective person to help challenge us on what the most important things to focus on are and get it straight in our minds.

We are still hoping to get some pre-Christmas training in with some other boats, so it will be good to get moving on some of those things straight away.