Jesse and Zander Kirkland return home this week after competing against some of the best sailors in the world over the past two months in regattas across Northern Europe.The brothers have competed in England, Holland, Spain, France and most recently Finland in their bid to qualify for the Olympics next year in London.The Games hopefuls started their worldwide tour with a promising 18th place at the Rolex Miami OCR in Biscayne Bay, Miami in the 49er division, while finishing 54th in the final standings at the ISAF Sailing World Cup in Palma, Spain.Claiming the recenttrip had been their greatest success in Europe, particularly in Holland where they finished 25th out of 39 boats, the brothers are happy to be continually on the water as they perfect their sport.“After a very productive trip to Northern Europe over the course of the last two months, we feel excited about our sailing and where it is going,” said Zander. “The trip has been our best foray to Europe yet. We were also blessed with great wind for most of these events and were really able to up our comfort level in racing these boats at high speeds.“The other major positive aspect of this trip has been our increased knowledge of how to manage the rig settings, largely through talking with our faster friends and figuring out things by trial and error.“A full year into sailing this boat full-time and we are miles ahead of where we were last year, hopefully we can continue this trend as we seem to be doing a lot of the hard things well and when we can polish up the rest of our game and fire on all cylinders, we are going to be pleased with our results.”The brothers head to San Francisco next month to continue their preparation in the 49er class, noting that the west coast of the United States has provided the best conditions to practise in with the shifty winds conditions.With international crews also scheduled to be at the same venue, it will provide the brothers with advice on how to tackle certain conditions and use different tactics.“We are excited to be heading to Santa Cruz and San Francisco in early August to continue our breeze practice because we really want to make a point of being competent breeze sailors in the class,” said Zander.“There very few venues in the world which are better to focus on windy 49er sailing than Coastal Central California and we will have an international crew of training partners to sail with.”