Had a good practice, barring one blemish that we'll need to work on - but knew we needed to work on.
It was all simple stuff, but it went well. We practiced coming up close to the wind, blowing the headsail to avoid backfill and being forced to tack. Got up to about 10 degrees off the wind with the main super high. Boom was above centreline to do this, perhaps we don't need to do that? Also need to practice the fall off and acceleration to find out how long it takes to get to full speed in different wind conditions and how many boat lengths that equates to.
Downwind we practiced scalloping (ventilating in Buddy Melges speak). Winding the boat up above ideal course to pick up speed then trying to work down. We also switched back to end-for-end gybes and after the first one they were pretty smooth, the spinnaker flying well through the maneuver and course changes nice and precise. The other thing we had a shot at downwind was lazy gybing, leaving the pole on the same side and switching to the other course for a few boat lengths before switching back.
The only blemish was our gybe set, which took several minutes to get the sail full and pulling. Need to work on this, seemed like we had several issues to resolve including a large twist in the spinnaker, a slow pole set and genoa drop. This was the first time we've actually tried to practice this outside a race and we'll be back again - looking to get the time down. I actually think it's gone faster when we've done it in a race, probably due to sheer panic.
Coming in at the end we passed a 41s5. While it was obviously not a racing boat but setup for cruising it was interesting how much faster we were, being able to luff up from several boat lengths below to a boat length above, have a good look, then dive off and head for home underneath them (being polite).
Oh - finally saw some dolphins, its been weeks since I've seen them around Oceanside but there came up and swam under the bow right as we were dropping the headsail. Beautiful view of them but no time to slap a camera in the water. Good to see them back again!
Oh - finally saw some dolphins, its been weeks since I've seen them around Oceanside but there came up and swam under the bow right as we were dropping the headsail. Beautiful view of them but no time to slap a camera in the water. Good to see them back again!
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