Racing is due to start at 10.00am here in Hard, Austria for the 2010 Women’s Match Racing European Championships and Ally, Annie and I are just having a cup of coffee and preparing to go out on the water.

As was the case last year, the Europeans this year is taking place alongside the Open event (nice for us to have some men around for a change!) and also like last year, the women have got the raw end of the deal with the boats we’ll be using compare to the men!

This week we’ve left the Elliott notes and home and will be starting a new page for Scholtz 22s. So far the three of us have spent just two hours in the boat which was yesterday during our training slot and we tried to find out as much as we could about them but I’m sure there is plenty more to learn. Unlike the Elliotts we’ve been putting all our time into recently, the Scholtz is an asymmetric and slightly more of a ‘keelboat’. I have to admit we weren’t overwhelmed with love for the boat but there isn’t much we can do about that other than get our heads down and race and move forward as much as possible with our boat handling and speed through the early rounds.

The event will start today with a round robin series in two groups and throughout the week will move onto another round robin in our groups, quarters, semis then finals on Saturday.

Hard is situated on Lake Constance and the race areas we’ll be using will be a mixture of inside the harbour (an area no bigger than Poole Park Lake) and the other course will be outside the Harbour and will hopefully be a little less shifty!

Wish us luck; it could be a venue where we need a little!

Lucy x