J24 Blog

As forecasted, the first night out on the lake was bitter cold, but with 22 boats on the line and a moderate breeze, it was time to go racing. Back on the water for the first time since last fall we tried to shake out the cobwebs. Hoist the spinnaker, a couple of gybes, douse, a couple of tacks up wind and drop the jib, ready for the horn. The race committee took some time setting the marks as the wind swirlred around a bit. Finally it was the 5 minute warning.

So far, so good. We debated our start strategy a bit and decided to start at the pin, which wasn’t much of a strategy, since it had nothing to do with the favored side. We’ve just grown accustomed to a port start at the pin and tack into a hole, so this being the first start of the year, we went with what we knew best.

Of course the pin end was favored, so here comes the fleet. Just before the gun we tacked into a “hole,” but we tacked a bit late and too close to a starbord tacker, probably a foul, but no big deal. But we were now going to be hard pressed to fetch the pin. We drifted a bit too close to the wind, and then across as the jib backwinded. Before we could ease the jib and fall off we began to drift through the unintentional tack, and then pick up speed until we spun into the starboard tacker and bumped them pretty hard. But it didn’t stop there. Now we were really picking up pace as we continued to spin to starboard this time hitting our next victim a bit more square on!  Not only have we now hit two boats, but they happened to be the ones owned by the Vice Commodore and Jr. Staff Commodore of the club! Madness.

We managed to escape and start on port, doing our turns, and coming in last. The damage to the other boats is superficial, but not nothing, so that will cost us. In our third season now it’s the first time we’ve caused an accident, and hopefully it will be a long time before the next. In the next race we found wide open clear air, in the second or third row and got off a clean start.  Much better.

Somehow neither the bitter cold nor the early drama did anything to diminsh the enjoyment and camaraderie of a great evening out on the water. Can’t wait for the next one.

*1) Jib* – Inducing twist to the jib on Sunday was definitely correct. However the jury is split on the trim of the jib. Some of the top boats actually had the jib sheeted out to just outside the spreaders . I do not think we (djinn) ever had it outside the spreaders, but we did have it in tight and neither worked very well. Perhaps out to the spreaders is the way to go and/or something to try for next time.

*2) Vang* – As much a I wanted to stress the vang on Sunday, I think I still underestimated it. The amount of vang required to keep the main flat is intense, which is why some boats blew out their vangs altogether.
Equipment issue: Not enough purchase to put it on tight. Not properly rigged to blow it easily if needed. UPGRADE YOUR VANGS TO MAXIMUM PURCHASE ALLOWED BY CLASS RULES.

*3) Downwind spinnaker* – Definitely my weakest point. One of my constant fears is accidentally gybing caused by the action of the waves. After just a minute of talking through my fears, I realized that accidentally gybing the main in heavy air is not going to easily happen under spinnaker. It’s hard enough to gybe the main even when we _WANT_ to gybe, because the main is pinned against the shrouds.

Being by-the-lee a bit or being dead downwind for the entire run and getting pushed by waves isn’t going to do anything to move the main. So, then the question becomes how to control the rolls, and the answer is moving weight back in the boat. We should have had everyone much further back, and we should have been twinging in hard on both sites to better control the kite.
Equipment issue: Twingers rigged aft instead of having their own cleats near the beam. The rear cleats are too crowded..twingers get in way of spinnaker trim.

… More in Part 2…

Hi all, it’s a pleasure to be a new blogger on this j24 blog. I’m the skipper/owner of Djinn and while I keep my own blog on Djinn’s racing activities, it’s private and mostly geared around scheduling and repairs. I’m excited to add my ramblings on here and hopefully it will help not only Djinn to get better but other boats that are starting out in this highly competitive Seattle fleet.

Peter asked me to start by contributing some observations about the Sound OD Championship on Oct 6/7, 2007 and since then I’ve traded some emails with other skippers about how we could have done better in this extremely heavy air regatta.

So, without further interruption, I’m going to include my initial race report below and then in subsequent posts for the next several days, I’m going to add some hits and tips I’ve gathered. The source of these tips asked me not share them with too many boats, but at the risk of never getting advice again, I’m going to throw discretion into the wind and post all of it in the coming days. After all, I don’t think there’s anything you read on a blog, read in a book, watch on YouTube or discuss over drinks at the CYC which is going to make you better at boat handling (with the exception of really learning and understanding the rules).

Here is my review of the regatta:

It was a great weekend, I was impressed with the performance of the top boats and how flat they were able to keep their boats. We certainly learned a ton.

Moving the mast butt forward, being properly adjusted on the shroud tension and bringing the Jib in as tight as possible, as well as moving the jib car back to induce some twist in jib seemed to help a lot, but we didn’t make these adjustments until Sunday. We also put the vang on much tighter on Sunday by sitting on the boom, sheeting in hard and cranking on the vang, but it’s clear to me I need more purchase on my vang, because it really wasn’t on enough. Same thing with our outhaul which we couldn’t get on hard enough either.

It blew like stink both days except for right before the last race on Sunday when it calmed down to about 14/15 knots and about a 1/3 of the fleet put up genoas. Then, it got up into the mid 20s during the race, with some stronger gusts, which was really something to witness.

On Saturday the race committee had a number of issues with the whalers and they were unable to start the racing for more than an hour and a half. We used some of the time running the course and trying to practice, but a whole lot of time was spent doing the gravy train around the start line and getting exhausted.

Congrats to Suspense and everyone who made it out!
————

Next I will post about some of the jib trim settings I was corrected on, as well more on all things heavy air, including the vang, the crew position, avoiding the accidental gybe, trimming the spinnaker downwind , the outhaul, shroud tension and tacking in big wind.

No wind tonight, but it’s 80+ degrees in September in Seattle, so by State Law we had to take the boat out, drift around, and drink beer.

That wraps up our season of Tuesday night racing for the year. I feel like we improved a great deal this year, more than our standings in the rankings reflect. The balance of “is it the sailors or the boat” continued to shift as our tactics and handling skills improved over the season.

I’ll write up a detailed schedule of the boat optimization plans we have for the off season, but in short we’re going to fill the various thru-hulls and defunct electronics that we’ve been uselessly dragging through the water this season, and sand and re-coat the bottom.

We’ll probably have the boat out of the lake for a month or two, then put it back in for some wintertime camping and cruising adventures. A weekend circumnavigation of Vashon Island is already in the works for Columbus Day…

Emails and phone calls and emails and phone calls and emails and phone calls and who’s in this week? Damn it’s been nothing but vacation schedules and work conflicts and weren’t we supposed to be racing the boat this summer? Ok we’ve got almost all the regulars back and Travis is actually threatening to leave Redmond early enough to get out and race for the first time this summer.

I arrive at the parking lot later than I wanted, hopefully Peter is setting up the boat.

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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.

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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.

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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" /]

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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 »

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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