Sunday, November 23, 2014

Race: Hot Rum II Lessons

Learning all the time here. Yesterday's race was terrible, we placed 101 out of 124, taking our overall position to 80th.

We can make this respectable in the next race.

And I could have saved it early on. As we pulled away from the start line we had wind but were slow relative to both the other 36.7s and targets. We stayed slow. We aren't slow anymore.

Lesson 1. Don't be slow. We aren't slow. Know how fast you are relative to the other boats and react if you aren't keeping up or overtaking. React early.

Lesson 2. Need to train more people in checking for kelp using the camera, or get a kelp window installed in the hull.

Lesson 3 (II). Get better at clearing kelp. The flosser doesn't work, reason being it floats at the top of the keel and generally the kelp is spread down the keel. Last time kelp messed up a race we decided to add weights to the flosser to help drag the kelp off the keel. The weights are on the boat but not on the flossing line. The idea is to try and avoid backing down, get the flosser to the top of the keel and drop the weights either side to pull the line down. Tomorrow I go to the boat and put the weights on the line.

Lesson 4. Work down when you can. Having caught back up too the fleet we should have beaten Fandango but went too high. They beat us by 30 seconds across the line and less in reality as we had starboard rights on them.

Here's a quick edit from Jonathan.

 

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