Jun26
From Ian Ainlee:
A Polish coach once said to me in typically blunt fashion: “when two boats cross tacks on the race course, you must know that one of you is right and the other one is an idiot. As you cross the other boat, think to yourself: ‘Which one am I?’”
Article: “Turning Point - America’s Cup Match - Race 3″ by Ian Ainslie
Jun20
No wind, no racing. Between 6pm and 9pm the wind never rose above 5 kts and the committee boat never even left the dock:
Jun20
Here is a prep-list for a successful J/24 campaign from the 2004 J/24 World Champion:
Full interview: Jens Hookansen, 2004 J/24 World Champion
Jun13
In the final evening of the Interim Series, we narrowed our last place position in the standings to only trailing by 4 points.
Our normal trimmer, Bill, was out on vacation, but Nate was back from a week away for work commitments. So that moved me back from foredeck to trimmer for the night, Nate into his place on foredeck, Chris as mast man, and Luke came out for the second time racing with us and took the pit position.
Peter and I arrived early to do some dockside repairs to the spinnaker (yes… sadly, the NEW ONE…) that occured during racing last week. We’ve upgraded ourselves from black sail repair tape on a green spinnaker that we used last year, to white on white this year. We’re so uptown now.
Light winds alternated with big glassy patches on the lake as we drifted out from the marina at 5:20 or so. Enough breeze filled in to allow some practice tacks and a spinnaker raise and douse. Everything was ready. Then we waited. And waited. 6:05 came and went. The committee skiff seemed to be trolling the lake using marks for bait.
Finally the course was set and the first race got off.
We intended to line up for our standard “opposite side from the clump” starting tactic. We didn’t get far enough away from the crowd in time and ended up getting rolled by a couple of boats and eating dirty air for what seemed like an hour. We bailed out and cut across the back of the fleet on port.
No fiascos ensued through the rest of the first race. We ended up early on the layline on the upwind beat, and seemed to make the wrong choice about which way to split around the restricted start line on the way downwind. However, we managed to catch up to the other boats trailing in at the end, and finished DFL, but only by about 20 seconds after the boat in front of us.
For those of you playing along at home: Please note the shift in units of measure from 20 boatlengths behind to 20 seconds behind. Yes, you read that right.
Jun11
First week of Friday Night Racing
We set out from Leschi at about 5:40pm on Friday. Aboard were Bill and Lorie, myself and Carrie, and our friend Weston. The weather was very nice and warm, but almost no wind.
We motored until past the 520 bridge and close to Hunt’s Point before raising sails, while we waited for the wind to build. Sandwiches and beers were deployed. Still no wind, so we motored again to get down to the start line.
I wanted to get to the waterfront in Kirkland early since it was our first time at this race. Other boats starting showing up and before long there were 15 or so milling about waiting for some breeze. We saw some of our fellow J24 sailors from the Tuesday night series on Gator and Atom Ant.
Jun09
During the second race last Tuesday we had another incident rounding a mark where a boat called foul on us. Approaching the leeward mark we noticed that two boats rounding ahead were stalled at the mark and there was enough room to pass between them and the mark. I called for room, although I’m now sure we weren’t entitled to room. It was not an attempt at deception, just a lack of real experience with the rules during mark roundings. Significantly, neither of the other boats contested or refused my request.
We came through the gap between the leeward mark and the two boats and drifted a bit due to the course being above close hauled. As soon as we could we tacked and completed our rounding. We neither hit the mark nor the other boats, but one of them did call a foul on us.
Again we had the benefit of hindsight in the form of gps tracks. In the following animation we are the blue boat and the boat that called foul on us is the green boat. I’ve left another (yellow) boat in the animation to help indicate the leeward mark location, which is an educated guess. The red circle is roughly the two boat length circle (16 meters). What this animation shows is that we were not entitled to room:
[kml_flashembed movie="wp-content/uploads/2007/06/rounding.swf" height="460" width="460" play="false" /]
Jun06
The night of weird wind conditions, delayed starts, general recalls, and two very odd races.
Between 3pm and 5pm the wind shifted 180 degrees even though it was blowing 15+. Closer to race time it seemed to have settled on a Northerly, but then continued to shift 15 degrees or so to the east or back to the west each time the committee nearly had the course set.
This left time for us to set and douse the spinnaker, realize that we were STILL delayed, set spinnaker again and did about 8 well needed practice jibes down the lake. After feeling a lot better sequenced, we headed back up toward the boat. Still delayed, so it left plenty of time for everyone’s favorite discussion to pop up: our starting strategy. Specifically the age old tradeoff “Is it better to start at the favored end but get buried in the second or third row, or work farther down the line (or all the way to the pin) and start in clear air.”
More about the second race where we don’t finish DFL after the fold… Continue Reading »
Jun04
I’ve been too busy at work to wade into the Sailing Anarchy Forums lately so evidently missed some of the chatter about this youtube video of a Capri 25 broaching.
Tillerman at Proper Course has a terrific posting in response to an email from Mr Hammet, the skipper of the Capri 25. Hammet has offers some great background context to how and why the video exists in the first place, and an excellent point of view about showing both the elegant, well orchestrated side of sailing and the challenging and unpredictable side.
In his words…
to remind everyone there, we are always learning and experiencing the ways to handle a machine that is totally dependent on all the energies of nature and efforts of the operators and its moving parts to all work together; and that any one or the other these gets out of balance, that events will lead to the disaster that whole world has now witnessed
Check out his comments on the Proper Course blog, THEN click through to see the video. It’s a jaw-dropper.
Jun04
We’re officially registered for the Anthony’s/SYC Kirkland Friday Night Series. This signals our first expanion beyond the hard limitation of only one racing night per week!
I updated the schedule on the blog to note the most recent confirmations that I received from everyone. Link to the Friday Night Schedule
So our crew situation looks like:
So out of 11 weeks of racing, we’ve got the boat scheduled to race 5 so far. Not bad. I’ll add some more weeks for me and Carrie soon.
You can see the other boats who are registered here
My expectations for Friday nights are:
Full report after the kickoff this Friday.
Jun01
A Race Report in Three parts with Assorted Trivia
What a night. What do you get when you cross this:
With this
Answer: Sailing nirvana. My apologies to Brian who couldn’t be with us. At least he still has a job.
And now for the race report. We had three races, finished all of them, and were DFL in only two. In other words, we beat another boat and we didn’t totally suck. In fact, if it weren’t for some penalty turns in the second race we most certainly would have beat a couple of more boats. More on that below the fold.
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