Chris Snow has a great write up of the final race to win North Americans this year. There are many details about his preparation, strategy, and tactics, including this description of the final approach to the line:
Now it was a waiting game. Main in Genoa out the boat can stop and lose very little distance to leeward. 15…10,9,8, genoa in main out, get the boat rolling, now point slightly below the pin, 4,3, genoa in main on slight luff to clear the pin and we are off, Klatt on our windward quarter, all clear, off to the races we go.
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.
Our heavy air jibes need work. They can be a bit, shall we say, hectic. I came across this from an interview of John Alofsin by Dave Dellenbaugh in Sailing Breezes:
As the wind builds, you make less and less of a turn through the jibe. When it’s quite windy, you need to steer an S-course jibe. To do this, bear off to start the jibe and get the main to come across. As soon as the main starts across and you know the jibe will happen, bear off immediately. There are two reasons for this. First, you have to counter the tendency of the boat to round up after the jibe, which is the most common (and disastrous) mistake in heavy air jibes. And second, by keeping the boat on a downwind course, you make it a little easier for the foredeck crew to do their jobs.
Here is the rest of the article can be found here.
Last Tuesday we had some confusion at the start. We miss judged the horn and timed our start about a minute too early. We later realized that when the postponement flag which had been flying was taken down a signal was fired off, and it was this that we took for the 5 minute warning signal. One issue was not knowing the start flag sequence well enough.
Races will be started by using RRS rule 26 except a blue shape will replace flag P. [Note for web version of racebook: This link to RRS rule 26 is to the 2001 rules. Rule 26 is unchanged in the 2005 rules, but US Sailing does not have the 2005 rules available individually.] The race committee may give a hail to the next class whose warning signal is about to be made.
Races shall be started by using the following signals. Times shall be taken from the visual signals; the absence of a sound signal shall be disregarded.
Start Flags
Signal
Flag and Sound.
Minutes
Warning
Class flag; 1 sound
5
Preperatory
P, I, Z, Z with I, or black flag; 1 sound
4
One-minute
Preparatory flag removed; 1 long sound
1
Starting
Class flag removed; 1 sound
0
So this is what the sequence should normally look like (with a “blue shape” replacing the P flag):
At 5 minutes:
At 4 minutes:
At 1 minute:
Recognizing these flags will give a more consistent pre-start countdown.
There was the time, for example, in the early days of the 1987 America’s Cup campaign, when Kirby was sailing aboard the 12-Meter, Eagle, with Davis, Toppa, and Kimo Worthington, among others. They were scrimmaging the Italians off Long Beach, and testing people in different crew positions. In one race Davis was trying out a new man on the bow; Kirby was at the grinders. Moments before the start, Kirby saw that the bowman’s wave-through to Davis was over-optimistic — the committee boat was anchored in deep water with lots of scope, and Eagle was going to foul the rode. With a wing keel and 14 knots of air in the sails, this was an unpleasant thing to contemplate, and Kirby started pulling off his seaboots. Eagle hit the rode a second or two later. Davis tried to tack away from it, and the rode looped over one wing; he then turned downwind, and the rode looped over the other wing as well. Now Davis had no steering, and Eagle was reeling in the committee boat at high speed. Kirby grabbed his knife, ran forward, and dove off the bow. He followed the leading edge of the keel down, took a good thump as the rest of the keel hit him, hung on with one hand, and cut the rode when the committee boat was a few feet from Eagle’s transom. At that point, Eagle took off again.
Peter Stalkus, a former major-league bowman who would later become Tom Blackaller’s navigator on Defender was on board Eagle at the time. “Stalkus knew I’d pop up somewhere,” said Kirby. By the time he hit the surface, Stalkus had a line trailing in Eagle’s wake; Kirby grabbed it and Stalkus hauled him aboard. Eagle restarted, chased the Italians, and lost by only 20 seconds.
The wind for tonight’s race is looking like it’ll be back into our normal 5-10 knot range. This should put us back into focusing on handling and trim, and not so much on survival and keeping the boat right side up like last week.
So far this season, we’ve been getting nice clear starts and feel good about our upwind boat speed. We’re tending to get to the first upwind mark ahead of some other boats in the fleet in the first beat, losing a ton of ground downwind, fighting to keep or close gaps on the second beat, losing more ground on the second downwind, and struggling to finish within 10 boat lengths of the tail end of the fleet. Clearly we have some work to do on roundings and sailing fast downwind.
However, one improvement we’ll test this week is pointing ability on the upwind legs. I know it’s the classic balance/tradeoff between pointing high with less boatspeed, or choosing to point lower for faster boatspeed. Finding optimal VMG. Since we have been consistently losing crossing battles with other boats, we started thinking that we were choosing to sail a bit too low for the tradeoff we were gettting in speed gain.
Easier said than done. We’ve now entered the zone of tweaks and nuances to get slightly better pointing ability.
First on my list is the outhaul. We haven’t upgraded to 6:1 pull so it’s almost always too loose according to the specs in our tuning guide. The result has been a leech that refuses to hook to windward, even with the traveler all the way up and mainsheet pulled on all the way. Tonight, we’ll try setting the outhaul on harder than before (and leaving it on in the downwind legs if need be) to see if that nets us a more trimmable main sail.
Aside from using it once when we had the kids on board and wanted to keep the boat flat without any drama, the blade jib has remained nicely folded into the 2 x 3′ red square sail bag for the two years we’ve had the boat.
Last Tuesday night we got to break it out for the first time for it’s intended purpose and quickly found that it’s a bit of a different beast than the genoa that we usually fly. We changed over to the jib just before the start of the first race and didn’t have time to dial in the lead placement in the right place on the track.
From the North Sails Newport Tuning Guide    Â
“BLADE JIB – Since it’s always windy when racing with the blade jib, the sail is easy to set up. The halyard is always tightened just enough to pull out the scallops between the hanks. The lead is set at one of two holes; an all-purpose setting, used 85 percent of the time, and the “death hole”, 1.5 inches farther back. It needs to be really windy to go to the death hole, but if you’re overpowered you have to do whatever you can to keep the boat flat.The all-purpose lead sets up the sail with six inches of depth from tack to clew, with the jib leech two to four inches inside the spreader tip. With our jib, the center of the jib lead block is one inch forward of the chainplate. At the all purpose setting, sheet tension should be varied so that the leech moves from 3 inches inboard of the spreader tip in 17 knots to 3 inches outboard in 25 knots. In the aft hole the leech will be trimmed between even with the spreader tip to 6 inches outboard.”
We’ll need to spend some time flying the jib, and finding the location of the two get track positions. Also, I think “Death Hole” just earned it’s way onto the “List of Alternative Boat Names That We Didn’t Go With”.
Tuesday night was a wild ride with sustained winds higher than any of our crew had raced the boat in. Luckily we had our full regular crew of 5 which gave us our best shot of racing the boat as flat and efficiently as possible.  We’ve had a number of newbies (even compared to our own short tenure) rotate through to help fill in this season.  It would have been pretty ugly and stressful had that been the case this week.  Ok, it was pretty ugly and stressful anyway, but it was fun.
All the pre-work on tuning the rig and working on our starts went out the window as soon as we made it out of the marina and into the 15mph+ winds.  Had we been out for a cruise it wouldn’t have been a difficult day. However, trying to stay in race mode, fly the genoa and continue to trim for speed made it a real workout. Which leads us to a recap of our best training program to date:Â
How To Gain a Half Season of Experience In Just Three Races
Use the “Immersion†racing experience to get your crew into top physical, mental, and adrenaline shape.Â
Step 1: While standing in the parking lot before heading out to the boat, don’t make a big deal about bringing foulies, boots, etc..  “Oh you think you’ll want to bring your full offshore foul weather pants AND jacket?  Ok, I guess…â€Â
Step 2: Go ahead and tune the rig up from the 5-8 knot setting to 9-12, but don’t let that high pitched whistling of the wind through the standing rigging fool you into believing it’s stronger than that.  It’s easy to de-power with sail trim and backstay tension once you are out on the water, why limit your ability to take advantage of changing conditions? Right?Â
Step 3: Demonstrate to the mid-boat and bow crew that the immersion will be immediate, tangible, and literal. Bury the bow into an oncoming whitecap to wash the seagull crap off the deck.  Don’t worry about whether people have their jackets zipped up yet.Â
