I've been reading a book called "High Performance Sailing". On chapter one at the moment it's all about weather and was talking about cloud and wind interactions. At one point we got hit with a decent gust and looking up where it came from you could see a big dark cloud with a thick rain storm under it. Textbook, the rain creates a down draft in the middle of the cloud that radiates outwards, this then combined with the base ?15knot breeze.
We hoisted the spinnaker but sadly noticed the boom gooseneck was coming loose before we gybed onto the faster down wave tack - had been hoping to beat our high speed but guess it'll last until next time there's good conditions.
The gooseneck problem is just a sheared cotter pin but it was tricky to fix in the waves, now I understand the connection better there will be spare pins on board and we'll fix it on the go if it happens again.
On the way back in we got another lesson in cloud wind influence. Just as we got back to the harbor the wind dropped from 12 knots, to 8 knots, to 4 knots spinning around in all directions and boat speed dropped to an uncomfortable and bouncy 1-2 knots.
We were running downwind and directly downwind of us was another larger rainstorm - pushing wind back in our direction. Behind us was another cloud, but n
o rain. This cloud was probably pulling wind into it and up, again working to cancel out the main wind. We were stuck in the middle.
After about 10-15 minutes the wind turned back on and hit nearly 20 knots.
What's crazy is to get good at racing we need to understand these cloud wind interactions, and be able to map them (moving!) across a race course and combine with racing rules and tactics.
Tuning: V1s at 40, D1s just on the gauge (3, gauge bottoms out at 2)
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