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| The competition: A Harpoon 5.2. There are two of these in our fleet both are sailed well. |
Tony and I
have continued to improve our racing skills. The last few races we did not
finish last in any single race, and the fleet was pretty tight. But we
need to find another 43 seconds of improvement if we want to be in the top
third of the fleet—that’s doable. We
need to clean up some things that cost us seconds and we need a strategy that
fits our boat.
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| The competition: There are two Lidos--very nimble boats especially in light air. A Harpoon is on the right. |
Tacking time. Depending on the wind, Kevin can tack his
boat in 7 -10 seconds less time than we can tack the Tanzer. If we can eliminate two tacks upwind, we gain
14-20 seconds of the 43 we
need. This is manageable. We need to be mindful of the wind patterns
and try to hold tacks longer. We need to
try and avoid tacking duels; we can’t win those—especially against the lighter
boats like the Cornnados and Lidos.
For
our boat it is better to overstand the windward mark than to risk the time it
would take to short tack twice at the mark.
Sail Choice. In winds above seven knots we need to use the small jib instead of
the Genoa. The Tanzer carries a lot of
sail for 16-foot boat. When the wind
reaches 10 or 12 knots with the Genoa up, we spend too much time spilling air just to
keep the boat upright. (We are too old to hike harder—steel pins in ankles and
rebuilt knees.) We have gotten pretty
adept at pumping to point a bit higher as the gusts ease, but it still costs us
time and energy. Better sail choices
could give us 10 – 20 seconds in
some races.
 |
| The competition: We race pretty even with the O'Day Daysailer. We owe them a few seconds. |
In
winds over 12 knots, we should reef the main and use the small jib. In the higher winds too much sail slows us
down and costs us a few degrees of progress to windward.
If
we get better with practice, it would be helpful to use the Spinnaker on the
downwind legs. It is a lot of mucking about on a very small foredeck, but there
are times when it would have given us 10
seconds or so on the downwind leg.
It would help even more when we get the rare reaching leg.
 |
| The competition: Coronado 15. Very quick to turn. Comes with trapeze. They owe us a few seconds. |
Rigging issues. Now and then we have little
rigging issues that cost us seconds. The
main sheets can get hung up on the aft mooring cleats. We
moved them 10 inches forward. We had too many things attached to the
spinnaker pole rig and had to fight that occasionally. We
added another ring above. The vang
would be in the way when Tony tries to change sides of the boat. We now
store it on a hook and only set it up when we need to on the downwind
legs. I was spending too much time
messing with the traveler, and it was distracting me from sailing fast
upwind. Now we just leave the traveler in the middle until we are on a long
windward leg.
 |
| The competition: Us. We need to not beat ourselves. |
Starts. We need to recognize that we are not as nimble as the other boats
during the start. We need to find a good
line—not necessarily the best line and get a decent start—not necessarily a
great—start. We are thinking something
like sail away from the line for 30 seconds when there are two minutes to
go. Commence our tack at 1:30 to
go. This should put us a little less
than one minute away from the start.
Then we can luff a bit and lay behind the Lasers that like to sit in a
pack just luffing. The nice thing about
them is that they accelerate away from the line quickly and leave you sitting
in pretty clean air. (Or maybe we should
just follow Jim in his Lido. He always
gets a great start.)
So
there it is. There are 43 seconds to be
found. By the end of this season we
should be able to move up a few places—but I doubt that we will be drinking any
beer until the races are over for the day.
We’ll see how we do this evening!
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