Spring Series: Race 2 [Posted by Steve on Wed 30th Mar 05]

Hi people
Hope you all had a good Easter. We did. It was our first cruise with the boat - did not go far but got up to Lymington for the night which taught us some lessons. Like if you put water in the sink it empties into the bottom of the boat! With a little mod it now works fine. We had a great sail home in the sunshine on Saturday ready for racing on Sunday.

As we motored out to the start it was looking to be a windy ish race and were thinking between the no1 and 2. We went for the old no 1 after a bit of sailing around then with 6 mins to go to the start the wind started to die away. So with a quick sail change to the new no1 we hoisted and started. Off the start line we knew we had made the right choice. We had a really good first beat over-taking 2 of the class one boats - we were happy about that. With a long run out from Bournemouth pier the wind was dying, we had the kite up and down and the jib up and down. We managed to just stay ahead of Tigerlily at the mark. With what was supposed to be a tight reach to the next buoy it was more like a dead run with the wind swinging around. We made some great tactics decisions downwind and stayed out right in the hope that we would pick up some wind and managed to creep our way forward at less than a knot. We stayed out right to the point that we were sailing passed the buoy. It was a big call to go for the buoy when we did and as we pointed at it we were close on the wind with the jib up. We managed to get up to 1.0 kt boat speed – really fast! As we got close to the mark the OOD decided that he was going to shorten course and we managed to get round and finish with the 2nd boat over 10 mins behind. We were very happy on the boat to have finished a difficult race

Well done crew
Steve

 

[ News index ]