IrishFreestyle

Day 2 blog entry... only 6 days left till the men's K1 prelims and the start of the competition.

Today started off with an early morning session (on the water for 6:30am) pre breakfast. Then back to Wilderness Tours resort for breakfast at 8:30. Breakfast is part of the deal we got when renting the Ranch.

We've decieded to do 2 team sessions per day. One in the morning and one in the evening. During the day the Waikiki wave becomes quite crowded so we thought this would be the best idea.

There's an organisers meeting tonight where we'll have a better idea of what the water levels are going to be like come competition time. Once it has been officially announced whether the worlds will take place on Bus Eater or Waikiki wave official team training slots will be allocated. At the moment people are getting air blunts front and back, pan-ams, helixes and mc nasties however its quite difficult to retain the moves. One of the advantages of having the competition on Waikiki is that you can paddle back up the eddy if you flush off the feature, this is not the case on Bus Eater wave. Overall people would much prefer if the competition could go ahead on Bussy.

Did up a cleaning schedule for the house today. Everybody gets a day where they have to make sure the house stays neat and tidy. Cracking banter! Otherwise today I'm heading for a group shop for the team house. Last night was chicken fillet, veg and spudz expertly cooked to perfection by Moe and Shane. The previous night was "spagbol" (Shane's word for spagetti bolognaise) cooked by myself, Gibson and Mark. Tonight I'm thinking fish but not sure how this will go down with the team. We go to the shopping centre in Pembroke which is the nearest large town about a half an hour's drive for the food. I also have to get a roof-rack for the car as we think that the Handi-racks might not be the best idea for the full 2 weeks in case we might damage the roof. Luckily though Shane managed to pick up a large roofrack for his car which he's renting from a friend and my rental car has a couple of rails on the side so it shouldn't be too hard to get a roof rack for it (see photo taken from the deck outside the ranch of the bunch of Irish team yobs hanging out of it).

I thought I'd include these seemingly mundane details so that all you budding freestyle team members can get an insight into what actaully goes on out here on a day to day basis in the run up to a major international competition.

Tune in tomorrow to find out how the fish for dinner went down with the team and if cleaning the only bathroom in the Ranch should be included on the list of duties on the cleaning rota!

Later fans,

Louis.

PS: For those of you who missed it the Nationwide piece we got on RTE is on the website at http://www.rte.ie/news/nationwide/ or see the forum topic over in the banter seciton.