A Jaggi Winter

PWA podium regular, Karin Jaggi, explains how winters should be spent ‘down under’.

Following our mini series on how the pros entertain themselves during the off-season, we hook up with former PWA World Champion, Karin Jaggi (Severne). Having been on the tour for well over a decade, you’d expect her to have the winter seasons well and truly sussed out by now. And, from what she says, it sounds like she does, but there’s not a huge amount of time in there for getting out on the water…

Over to Karin to explain away her winter.

“Winter for me is the best time of the year – mainly because you can choose where you want to go sailing. My winter program is a bit ‘boring’ though because for the past 10 years I’ve spent as much time as possible in Western Australia [That doesn’t sound very boring to us!].

For me, WA is simply the perfect spot. There are countless beaches which provide really different, challenging, and world class sailing conditions, without any crowds on the water, and the few people that you do meet at these spots are really friendly.

We used to travel loads up and down the coast but nowadays I hang out in Margaret River (250km south of Perth) most of the time. We are building a house there, the roof is on and the windows are going in this week. After that it’s up to us to complete the interior: tiling, flooring, painting, cabinets, even the kitchen we want to do ourselves – so I should get a good workout over summer/winter. And apparently the sailing season has already started so Scotty Mckercher (Starboard, Severne) told me...

So my typical winter day should be something like this: get up really early to check the surf but avoid heading out and instead start up the computer to surf the net for a couple of hours (as we are just starting our own board brand right now I will have to spend a few hours doing office work every day). Once I’ve finished my emails and all the boring stuff, I’ll head to the building site for a serious “construction workout”, and then when the calls from the beach start coming in frequently and it gets hard to ignore them because it’s windy and superb sailing, I’ll sneak off and score the late sailing session – usually the best hour of the day anyway.

That’s the plan, let’s see how it turns out!”

There you have it, another pro spending their winter somewhere warm and windy. There seems to be a pattern occurring here…