If you’re planning a holiday in Rio, or watching the Olympic sailing live – make sure you plan carefully. The domestic airport is going to be closed down for 4 1/2 days during the competition around Guanabara Bay.

This is partly to allow filming of the event – helicopters mainly, but also the crews have complained that the low flying aircraft coming in to land or taking off could be a major disruption to racing boats. Not too sure on that last point but the Government has confirmed the airspace will be close and nothing in or out.

NOTE: This is the domestic terminal, not Rio international as that’s much further inland. Just be careful though because it’s going to cause chaos for travel around the area as 10’s of thousands of people will be hitting the roads instead of using internal flights. The Presidents chief of staff says they realise the disruption will cause problems but for the games it really was justified.

It is however going to be a stunning games with some amazing sailing. If you have ever seen the mountains around the area, not to mention the Sugarloaf Mountain of course, you’ll know we’re in for some pretty special coverage – even if you only see it on a TV screen.

A couple of Australian names you might recognise have been helping out a young crew in their preparations for the Melges 32-class world champs.

Grant Wharington and Rob Brown are acting as mentors for the crew from Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron to get them up to scratch for Miami, Florida this December.

The guys are competing in the Audi Hamilton Island Race Week (on this week) amongst over 180 boats. They age from just 16 years old up to Captain Matt at 21. It’s a full on 8 days of getting things right. But it’s often a bit of a lottery for the Florida clubs.

In other Florida news, two players have split the jackpot on the Fantasy 5 winning $100,694.82. And there were no winners for both the Florida Lotto and the Powerball. Looks like a few more people need to join my favorite Powerball lottery pool then.

More competition news up shortly.

We all love a good sporting challenge, and sailing certainly provides one of the most exciting.

But another of my favourite sporting ‘guilty pleasure’ pastimes is playing the lottery.

I know many of you guys enjoy this little flutter from time to time too, so I don’t feel too guilty about sharing it here.

I play a couple of games on a regular basis, but also love playing in a ‘pool’. And where this collides quite nicely in one particular case is with a EuroMillions syndicate I enjoy playing with.

Now EuroMillions is not everyones cup of tea. The odds are pretty horrible of hitting the jackpot (check the official site) – but that’s why I figure playing in a syndicate is the best option. Because that boost in the number of tickets you buy soon brings the odds back down again, but also because even in a fairly big group you can all still end up millionaires if you get a jackpot win. Because the jackpots do regularly get very big.

In fact they range from big to stupidly big. So your group can even end up multi-millionaires on a good day.

I’ve played with lots of different syndicate groups over the years, including one of the UK’s most popular called B.F.L. – you can find a Big Fat Lotto review here for more detailed info on them. And from the same site you can also find lots more lottery syndicate reviews too.

I also like the plain old boring  main UK Lotto game. Although it lost a bit of appeal when they revised it and put the price up. They added on a useful ‘raffle’ type game to the main draw – but made it compulsory and doubled the ticket price to cover that and some prize re-jigging.

I’m not sure it wholly worked, but they said they needed to do something to cater for the drop in revenues. I guess I stick with it out of habit – I’ve been playing it on and off since the first draw when it launched – maybe I’ll actually win it one day 🙂

And I don’t suppose I’ll get tired of it anytime soon either.

I’d be interested to know what games you guys prefer. So get in touch and let me know. Maybe I’ll do a round up later on to reveal our vices publicly to the world – anonymously of course 😉

Cowes Week, UK. The Etchells Invitational Cup saw 20 different clubs from around the world compete in a matched fleet from Etchells. It was the first time for this event, which required no more than a single pro member per boat crew.

It turned into a close fought race with 3 leading boats all in the running on the final day. But it was the team from Antigua who managed to claim the overall victory.