Pretty obvious that its going to take a while to get a race crew settled. Initially we sailed upwind, working on tacking then raised the spinnaker and ran for a while. Almost hit 10kts on a small wave but not quite into double figures yet. Next time!
We gybed about 5-6 times and only the last one wasn't a disaster - hopefully no-one was watching. Wondering what the difference was between this and the previous week was, where the gybes were a bit slow but not disasters I came up with a few reasons:
- The wind was stronger
- Because we were a man down I worked mast myself, thinking I could see the whole boat, I couldn't and this left two novices trimming without enough oversite. I need to stay in the afterguard.
- Adding lazy spinnaker lines simplified life up front but made trimmers lives more complicated, which combined with the above point was a problem.
To fix the problem with the lazy lines I think we need to steer down under the spinnaker, swap the pole and sheet trimmer and have them sheet their new line in on the new side until the line it replaces goes slack, then get that line off its winch asap. Sounds simple in practice but with 7 people clambering over the boat who don't know what they are doing it's surprisingly not at the time.
Next time....
Having said all that it was a perfect sailing day, lovely weather, fun people to be on the boat with and we steadily got better during the day!
Here's our speed chart, when I've got the data crunching app in a bit better shape I'll add it to the software section (but still leave the really basic connection code there as a starting point if needed). Max recorded speed 9.67kts.
Thanks Hongo for the pictures!
