Practice Race and Opening Ceremony

Rain, rain, rain and no wind. That would be the short summary of the day. And now more in detail:

The whole morning it was raining. Only at 12.00 it stopped, exactly when the sailors were leaving the harbor for the practice race. There was enough wind, so that the the committee could launch two starts, for each fleet one. But the boats couldn't reach the first mark. It started to rain again and the wind dropped. So the practice race was canceled. Unfortunately, the weather forecast for tomorrow looks about the same than today. But we still can hope for at least a little bit of wind.

As it didn't stop to rain, it was raining during the opening ceremony as well. We had to wait a little while until we could walk along the marine parade in Napier. This short unstructured walk ended on a place, where Maori people welcomed us. They started softly and ended with loud and scary singing. Then the officials were holding short speeches and declared the IODA World championship as open.

From now on we get breakfast and dinner in a big tent together with all the other nations. The swiss sailors are looking forward to meet some nice girls respectively boys. Actually right now, they can't talk of anything else. ;-)