nat and i need every opportunity to improve, not only individually but also as a team and also handling the boat. the wind forecast for the two days was not necessarily great and we were a bit apprehensive; as a result we set the rig for strong winds, which particularly on the second day would not have been necessary.
as always there were a few things to fix: the downhaul loop was too short (my mistake) and nat suggested we make loops to help pull up the centerboards. naturally did a great job with those. they look good and it’s almost impossible to grip the boards without them.
on the first day the wind was considerably stronger than we expected and we probably wouldn’t have thought we could manage purely based on the numbers – turns out we could. we then also set the rig pretty tight on the second day based on the forecast but that was unnecessary; on the upside that gave us confidence to practice our manoeuvres and on the whole it worked well.
we definitely did well as a team and aside from a few small mistakes we sailed really well. i don’t think i drove the boat hard enough and my laylines need work (especially downwind) but with better settings we could also have sailed better angles which I think was our main issue. we still had good speed but next time we’ll spend a bit more effort trying to optimise the settings.
we also had a few small issues: right before the start of the first race we noticed our main was not hooked in – fortunately we were able to fix that. and nat noticed that the dyneema pulling the kite out on the pole had stretched and the block was getting in the way, making it difficult to hoist the kite; nothing we could do on the water but we fixed it when we got back to shore. lastly one block on the 10:1 main sheet broke off which at times got wedged in and blocked the main – dicy.
and this is how not to bear away to make the start pin … really bad steering on my part, hopefully that won’t happen again.