Breaking gear is never a great feeling, but if you're going to do it, now is a good time to book it in. After all, it's better to break something now at the end of the racing season than mid-way through your Nationals, and if you break something really major then it's a good excuse to get out of the cold for a few weekends while it's being fixed. However, something you never really want to do is break off the front few inches of your boat, especially when it's about to be containered off to the other side of the world in a couple of weeks.

This is what happened to the boys on the Fat Face 18-foot skiff, skippered by Tim Penfold with John McKenna and Martin Sellars doing the grunt work at the front. They went out into Chichester Harbour for one of their last weekends of training before the skiff gets shipped off to Sydney in time for the JJ Giltinan unofficial world championships in February. They went hooning off down the harbour at low tide, just inside the line of channel marker buoys when... thwhackk. They hit land, a piece of land known locally as Stocker Bank. As the centreboard struck, the bow went down. The carbon bowsprit shattered, but not only that, the front few inches of the bow snapped off, leaving the mast without a forestay attachment. The three crew all got bundled round the front but amazingly no one was seriously hurt.

The shame-faced Fat Face boys got a tow back to shore, looking very sorry for themselves, and their boat even sorrier. Initially the fear was whether or not there would be time to get it fixed before the container date. However they twisted Ian Lovering's arm and booked the battered boat into his Ashdown Marine workshop, and got some major refurb work done on the 17 ½ foot skiff. Three weeks later, the hull was 18-foot long again and beautifully resprayed in black. The boat looks very cool, it's still down to weight, and it's ready to ship downunder. So a happy ending for Tim and his team.

Just a couple of days after the 18 hit the pebbles, I was back down at Hayling to see one of Skandia Team GBR's winter training sessions in play. The breeze came in strong that day, with 49ers and even Tornados cartwheeling their way back home after encountering conditions that were a bit too much even for our accomplished Olympic aspirants. It's always inspiring to see the Olympic squad at work, doing all the stuff behind the scenes that contributes to their very public successes during the racing season. Some sailors spend a good chunk of the morning just grinding out endless miles on exercise bikes or rowing machines, building up their base aerobic fitness and teaching their bodies to turn fat. Dull work maybe, but there's no substitute for it, and these days at least you can seek refuge in your iPod while you're pedalling along.

The other thing that always strikes me is how goal and process driven the Olympic sailors are. For them it is just the way they operate, they don't even question it. Even for the younger members of the team, discussing goals with the coach and writing them down is as much part of their routine as putting on their wetsuit and hoisting the sails before going sailing. The RYA is getting the sailors into good habits from an early age.

One sailor who clearly ‘gets it' is Dave Evans, who with Rick Peacock forms one of the up-and-coming teams in the 49er. Dave and Rick won the 29er Worlds in 2003 before switching to the bigger skiff and not surprisingly they've made a very successful transition. Unlike some of his contemporaries who bypassed university and went straight from youth racing into Olympic campaigning, Dave is now in his second year at Swansea University, and so 49er sailing for the time being must play second fiddle to his studies. He's making the Gold Fleet (final 25) in most major regattas he enters, and he's quite capable of taking races off the likes of Draper/Hiscocks and Morrison/Rhodes. Evans/Peacock will be a force to be reckoned with once they go full-time - if that's what they choose to do, of course.

For all his clear talent, Dave is very unassuming, very approachable. He said it wasn't until it was publicly announced at school that he'd become a world champion that his friends even knew just quite what he got up to on the weekends. Even then, their knowledge of sailing terminology didn't spread much beyond ‘shiver me timbers' or ‘splice the mainbrace', so Dave took a couple of them out for a sail on the 29er, which soon changed their view of the sport.

A couple of years ago in this column I suggested that if each of us took one person sailing during the coming year who had never experienced sailing before, how many people could we get hooked on the sport? Well, on that point - aside from taking a couple of his friends for the odd joy-ride - Dave also gets involved in a winter challenge with another accomplished yachtie from his home club of British Steel Sailing Club, the Fireball world and national champion DJ Edwards.

The challenge between DJ and Dave is for each to recruit someone who has never sailed before and race with them throughout the winter series, and see who wins. Nothing too challenging in that - if you were to go out in a Mirror or a Wayfarer perhaps - but in this case the challenge takes place in 29ers. "It's not easy," admits Dave, "but once you've got a reasonable amount of skill helming the boat then you should be able to keep the boat upright through the manoeuvres." A "reasonable amount of skill", meaning, I suppose, being a world champion! Now the rival helms are talking about taking the challenge up to 49er level, which sounds like they're asking for trouble, if you ask me! But what an introduction to sailing that will be for the rookies. It will be interesting to see if they continue in the sport after that, or if they jump in the car at the first sight of the 49er and drive straight back home.

From one accomplished sailor at the beginning of his 49er career to another who feels his best days are running out, I caught up with American sailor Morgan Larson during a recent winter recce of Valencia. Morgan, aged 35, has recently joined the Swedish America's Cup team Victory Challenge despite having had offers from other teams that stand a better chance of winning the Cup. One of the factors for accepting the Swedish offer in favour of some of the bigger teams was the clash of dates between the America's Cup Match in late June/early July and the ISAF World Sailing Games in Cascais at the beginning of July. This is the World Championship for every Olympic class, including the 49er, and Morgan intends to make that the start of his full-time push towards Qingdao 2008. His crew Pete Spaulding, who finished 4th in the last Games crewing for Tim Wadlow, will be completing his business studies degree a few weeks earlier, so Cascais was scheduled as the first regatta when the team would step up from part time to full time.

Then those lucrative America's Cup offers came along. The proposal from Victory seemed a good compromise to Morgan, as even the most fervent of Victory fans would admit that the team's chances of getting into the final against Alinghi are pretty slim. A place in the semi-final would be a very respectable result for the Swedes, and progressing further would be a massive bonus. If, however, Victory do prove to be an unstoppable force and make it all the way through to the very end, then Morgan has negotiated a penalty clause in his contract which means that while he is helping the Swedes beat the Swiss, Pete will at least receive a financial compensation for twiddling his thumbs on the beach in Cascais.

The more likely scenario is that Morgan will be released from Valencia some time in June, at which point he will have few precious weeks to get up to speed with Pete. The 49er class represents unfinished business for both of them. Pete, as already mentioned, came close to a medal in Athens while Morgan has never been to the Games, although he has finished 3rd in the World Championships on three occasions. They're not expecting a podium position in Cascais, not with so little practice, but the first goal is to qualify the USA for a place in Qingdao. Then the US Olympic Trials come along in San Diego this October. "It's typically fairly light winds there," says Morgan, "although there's a chance you'll see more on a couple of days." So perhaps San Diego won't be such a bad replica of conditions on the far side of the Pacific, but what is amazing is that a big nation like the USA continues to put its faith in a one-regatta, winner-takes-all selection process. The RYA moved away from that system years ago, and has since avoided any of the embarrassment of leaving reigning world champions on the bench while relative rookies went out to do battle at the Olympics.

Morgan's not a big fan either of the one-week domestic trial, as he feels that he and Pete fare better against their compatriots in the big international championships. As it is, San Diego will have a very limited field of American 49ers, with only a handful capable of winning races, so boatspeed will be key. This is where Morgan's money from the Cup campaign, along with some very useful and experienced friends from Valencia, will come in very useful. Morgan and Pete will spend the intervening months between Cascais and San Diego in testing different equipment, employing the very best coaches, and regaining the last few percent of technique that will have disappeared while sailing 80-foot keelboats for the past year.

As well as being an excellent skiff sailor, Morgan is an avid surfing fan and has pulled off some pretty smart stunts with a wakeboard, including riding off the stern wave of a Cup boat as it was being towed in at the end of a day's training in Auckland four years ago. There's no doubt that Morgan loves his ‘day job' of keelboat racing in the Cup and on the offshore circuit, but it's great to see that his love for high performance dinghy sailing remains undiminished, and that he's even prepared to take a pay cut to go after his Olympic dreams. I hope he makes it.