Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday and 2008 brings good health and prosperity.

Sally and I headed out to San Francisco for Christmas. We had a fantastic week with Paul and Val Erickson who hosted us at their wonderful home in Tiburon. I love that place. Every time we visit it gets harder to leave. I was asked to do a speech at my yacht club (the St. Francis Yacht Club) the day after Christmas. I felt honored that I was asked to make the speech and jumped at the opportunity. I spent many days and nights going over in my head and on paper what it was I would exactly talk about. After a few minutes with my father, we decided that it would be most interesting if I talked about the process of putting together a winning team and preparing for a regatta like the Olympic Trials and ultimately, the Olympic Games.

I was really stressed before I gave my speech. I was worried if I was prepared. I was also worried that no one would show up given it was the day after Christmas. Well, I made it through the speech in a standing room only setting and people actually said it was fantastic. I don’t think it was the best talk I ever gave, but apparently people loved it. All good.

John and I left for Miami on January 4th bright and early. We held a training session with our training partners Marc Pickel & Ingo Borkowski and Hamish Pepper & Tiny Williams from Jan 4th until the 13th, with a two-day regatta on January 5 & 6 run out of the Coral Reef Yacht Club. We did a bit of sailing before the regatta mostly to get our heads into it and take the boat out for a shake down sail. We sailed two races on Saturday, against 38 other boats.

After the first two races and at the end of day one, we were in second place. One point out of first. Sound familiar? Sunday we had only one race and we missed our opportunity to close the door. At the end of the day, we ended up 4th overall. It’s a little disappointing given the fact we had an opportunity on the first beat to lock the race up, but unfortunately this is life and we learned a lot in one race. It’s interesting you would think after sailing day in and day out all your life, how is it possible to learn anything else. Sailing is funny; every time we leave the dock we learn something. I love learning so I am really into it!

Over the week of training we made huge gains on what we learned. I don’t want to go into what we did, but I honestly can say we learned a ton in one week! At the end of the day we were going well, very well! It was a very productive week of training.

We did manage to have some fun this trip. We brought our 3 Finn’s (another type of sail boat for one person that is also in the Olympics) to Miami for some additional training action. Our days were more of the same wake up too early go to the gym for two hours, come home do a little work, have a few meetings about the day then go sailing four about four hours then back to the dock.

Here is where it gets interesting and fun, Hamish’s crew “Tiny” and I would take the Finns out after we got back in from the four hours of training in our Star boats and go back out sailing to battle against each other until dark. Man, I felt like a kid again playing ball outside until Mom called us in for dinner. When you sail every day things get boring but I can honestly say, Tiny and I had the best time out on the water without any coaches just grinding upwind and pumping our asses off downwind. Just trying to kick each other’s teeth in on the racecourse! Awesome!!

Tiny (this is his nickname he is 6’5” and built like a NFL linebacker and is one of the most fit people I have ever met) well he cried uncle before I did when we were sailing upwind in the breeze in the Finns. (Thank God he did cause my quads were about to explode) the Finn is one of the more difficult things I have done in recent times. It’s a great way to get in shape!!

We also had a team building night out in South Beach… nuff said….

I am back home for a week, where my company the EMS Group just acquired another mobile home community and making some final preparations in anticipation of the Miami Olympic Classes Regatta which is held in Miami from Jan 28-Feb 2nd.

I will keep everyone posted!

Austin Sperry