remmie’s sailing blog

Weekend race, started fairly solidly, bit of confusion with the start; downwind?!?  Got away decently, 3rd around the first mark to our main competitor in a Farr92 and a Beneslow 38-42ish.  Pulled back 3BL and got an overlap on the 2nd mark.  He broke right, we went a bit more left where we felt there was better air and we put ourselves in a solid 2nd place (he kept going right for the rest of the day and kept getting served for it, bit of slow learning).  Got round the top mark and unleashed the kite, Beneslow was very slow hoisting and didn’t have the DW speed we do in that sort of wind (10k).

Beneslow fought kind of pointlessly; significantly bigger boat we weren’t going to cause him a lot of pain, we were clearly faster with a comparitively bigger kite capable of going a lot shy’er and he was trying to luff us into the break water (i.e. we were going to get obstruction rights).  Didn’t really hurt us that much, we drove over the top of him, he tried to follow, wrapped his kite up and got fed to the pack; lost 3 positions (plus an extra couple divi 1 boats in front of him) trying to win an impossible arguement.

Big run back offshore, fresh breeze came in, the guys behind caught it first but it just had a bit more ompf off the beach a couple mile; normal rich get richer thing.  Had a naviguessing error on the final mark, wasn’t the naviguesser’s fault (i.e. me), the skipper just forgot the heading coming around the mark so decided to “head a bit higher to be safe” until I had time to check the heading again.  Apparently 60 degrees above is “safe”.

Ended up with a 12 minute lead for a 2 hour race, first and fastest; happy lil vegimites.  Bit stressed now though, we’ve got something to live up to now and we’re gonna end up with mud on our faces when we go tits up.

Turfed one of the crew; kept panicking and stuffing up on the first inshore (tried to turf me overboard by releasing the topping lift halfway through a gybe), first offshore he was a bit better but on the weekend he was just a complete no show.  Been a bit flakey overall, didn’t put any time into boat preparation with the rest of the regular crew, etc; so he’s out.  Need a replacement now, anyone in Perth want a ride?

Oh, and after the committee antics from the first inshore (over time, DSQs, etc; see below) they decided to scrap the entire race; looked like someone protested, letter from the chairman basically saying it was non-negotiable and no futher protests can be entered.  Not sure how that’s going to affect us for the inshore series over all but we shall see.

Found out the camera is going to cost $100-150 to fix *cringe*.  Try and get it sorted this week and hopefully have it back up and running for next weekend.  Although there are some pics up from last weeks offshore race at http://www.sailinganarchy.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=36786; sorry OG, I know devil’s spawn website

Rgds,

remmie

PS Worked out what I’m going to use this for now as well, personal sailing diary so if you don’t like it, www.google.com (suggest searching for “meatspin”)