Saturday 16 May 2009

Howler

Royal Southern Yacht Club May Regatta - Day 1

"Blowing monkeys out of trees." It's a stupid saying, but today there were certainly not many monkeys aloft. As the WindGURU extract shows, it was howling on the Solent today. As a result, probably 10 out of the 17 boats entered in IRC Class 1 made it out to the race course.

On Cajou, we were a little early for the start. The idea is normally to do some spinnaker sets and tacks before racing, as there is almost always a new face on board. But today none of us wanted to put any sails up until absolutely necessary. So we motored around for an hour or so, watching the windex register 30+ knots.

For the first time ever, I raced with a reef in the main. Cajou spins out at 15 knots, so we would never have made it through the race with a full main. Unfortunately, racing sails are not really designed to be reefed (apart from having the reefing points), so the shape was less than optimal, despite the 6:1 cunningham.

Also a first, we didn't use the spinnaker for the whole day. Although the downwind legs were mostly quite broad, we were hitting the target speeds with just the jib. More importantly, of those boats that flew kites, nearly all broached and a more than one ended up destroying the sail. After the first downwind leg boats were dropping like flies. In the end, only four boats finished in our class, out of 17 entries. Race two was cancelled.

Day 2

When we came down on the next morning, the weather was not a lot better. Mark (the owner) was tempted to send us back home: there is no point risking breaking something, or someone, unless the race is important. His thinking may have been influenced by the fact that we tore the leech on the mainsail while taking it down the day before. We all backed him, knowing that the IRC Nationals were coming up. Despite not taking part in the second race, we ended up fourth overall. Result.

No comments: