For never sailing together, David and Arielle’s personalities seem to really match up out on the water. After the first day, they placed 39, 41 and 33 which is pretty good for sailing together for the first time. They were still having some issues with the port daggerboard.
Day two of the regatta was David’s birthday!!! Very exciting way to celebrate a birthday! The team spend their whole morning working on the port daggerboard. After 2 hours of work, they were finally able to get the board functioning correctly. The Nacra 17 fleet was only able to get 2 races in that day due to the wind shutting off. David and Arielle placed 44 and 43.
The team woke up again nice and early to continue working on the rig and other things that could be tweaked to make the boat perform better. She is a relatively old boat compared to everyone else’s. We were always in the top 20 
rounding the windward mark, but we were never able to keep up our boat speed on the downwind. We placed 41, 39, 39 and 40 on the third day of the regatta.
The fourth day of the ISAF World Cup was just awful. The PRO made the whole fleet since out in the cold rain for 2 hours before realizing the wind will just not fill. After the 2 hours the PRO sent us back in to go play in the enormous puddles in the parking lot. Around 2pm, we went back out again to do 2 races. Unfortunately during the first race of the day, our daggerboard went through the hull, completely demolishing any chance of racing for the rest of the week. We get towed in and luckily we were able to get the daggerboard freed so we could pull our boat up. We called the Nacra dealers and apparently it was a design flaw with the daggerboard and the well it sits in.
The finally day of racing, we go out with our coach, Robbie, and watch the rest of the fleet so we can continue learning. That day we decided that we are a great team and we have what it takes to hopefully see ourselves in the 2020 Olympics. From that day on, we formed the team HDsailing. We definitely took away a bunch of information sailing together during the ISAF World Cup and we are excited to see what comes when we continue our efforts. So stay tuned for Team HDsailing and what we will be accomplishing in the next four years!
