SLAM Kiwi Match was in Italy last weekend, the home of SLAM; unfortunately it wasn’t a happy hunting ground for the team. Although Trapani turned it on with great weather, great breeze and an enjoyable regatta, the team was unable to turn on their own performance.

Sailing with a slightly modified team for this event made it difficult to maintain momentum from La Rochelle, but we definitely had the ability on board to produce a good result. The training day and first few races were made up mostly of translating our moves into Italian-English for our local bowman. Gianluca did a great job of quickly coming to terms with what was required and worked extremely hard to understand our kiwi accents which couldn’t have been easy.

When the first race day finally got underway after a typical Italian slow start which included plenty of talking and plenty of coffee we found ourselves on quite a nice roll. Winning all our 5 races on the first day including a black flag win over the young Italian team we were in good shape. We knew though that day 2 was going to be tough, and with plenty of racing to get through we still had it all to do.

The sun and perfect 15 – 20kt breeze was back for the second day of sailing, but with the rest of the round robin and semi’s and final’s to get through the race committee was under the pump. Unfortunately it seemed the race committee wasn’t making the most of conditions and after multiple delays it was becoming apparent that they were running out of time for finals. This meant it was critical to win our remaining round robin races to ensure we finished top of the table and first over all.

Disappointingly though, we stumbled at this final hurdle again and dropped our last 2 races to the Australian and English teams. This relegated us to 3rd at the end of the round robin and overall. We just weren’t able to put it all together in these final races, letting them slip away from us. We’ll definitely work hard over the next few weeks to make sure we are doing the little things well and to ensure our crew work is at the level that it needs to be.

The team has a couple of weeks off before our next event in Poland, so plenty of time to figure out what we need to do to get it right. Both Laurie and Logan will also be competing in the Match Cup Sweden World Tour Event next week with different teams, which is a great chance to sail at the highest level and build experience. As per normal we’ll keep our website updated with twitter feeds from Sweden so keep an eye on how the Kiwi Match boys get on.

It's take 2 for SLAM Kiwi Match as the team re-groups in Trapani, Sicily for the next event on the calendar, the Trapani Match Race Cup. A chance for the team to build on a solid start in La Rochelle and also a chance to convert our solid performances into a regatta win.

The team takes on a slightly different shape this week with Mark Tighe from Ireland joining us and also a local legend from Palermo. Mark brings a wealth of experience with him from big boat inshore and offshore regattas right through to match racing in his CV so is sure to add a lot to the team. Our local bowman John, from Palermo, Sicily will be a great help to the team both on and off the water.

There looks to be a solid field of competitors at this event with teams coming from Australia, Great Britain, Greece, Russia, Slovenia and Italy. This will bring a great international flavour to the event and coupling that with the ability of the Italians to run a well organised regatta it is sure to be a lot of fun. The regatta will be sailed in Zipp 25 keelboats, very similar to the Platu 25's we raced in La Rochelle. This will be helpful for us as we can re-use a lot of the tricks we learnt there to give us a head start here.