Thursday Night is Race Night

I am in the midst of trying to organise an informal race night at the local lake.  Its only 3 minutes drive away and that makes it perfect for after work sailing.  Hopefully the wind will play ball and be a solid force 5 every Thursday night.  However, I would be happy with 6 knots and it will be good to get some competition in.

The plan is for very informal racing with no limitations on kit as the idea is to get people on the water and going round a course.  If people want to take it more seriously then I will look to organise more formal classes and rules, but for the moment I think it will be enough for people to get some competition into their sailing.  That said, the club has a number of Starboard Rio boards and we could perhaps use those as a semi-one design class.

I am also planning on taking the race series to a couple of coastal venues and maybe we can see if people want to enter any of the BSA series races.

Horton

Horton in November  
Was it really November when I had my last decent UK wave sailing day?  What has happened to the weather this year?  No decent SWs for months, fingers crossed for the sea breeze season on the South Coast.

Will the wind ever come back?

This year in the UK has to rate as the worst for wind ever!  We have had so few of our prevailing SW winds and loads of anti-cyclonic gloom.  This weekend was more of the same as the NE (cold) winds wafted in.  Absolutely no use for setting any records, but not too bad for some light wind freestyle practice.  Now, light wind freestyle is a bit like running for me; I know that its good for me, but I can not face doing it.  However, in both cases I find that if I do it several times in quick succession I sort of kinda enjoy in.  Today, I forced myself to do some light wind freestyle, so I spent a chilly hour or so (about 8C) doing:

• Upwind 360s;
• helitacks (one- and two-handed);
• Sail and body 360s;
• Duck gybes;
• Rig 360s; and
• Backwind gybes.

(Chris - you may need to refer to the Trictionary book to see what these are)

But I could not get any push or duck tacks.  So something to work on.

The kit for today was my 5.9 Hot Sails Maui Spyclone and my Tabou Windstyler

To see how to do light wind freestyle properly have a look at:
http://tinyurl.com/35fjyt8

Rigging - Hot Sails Maui GPS 2009 8.0m

After sailing a whole knot slower last weekend (when I rigged my sails) to the other weekend when Chris rigged my sail I thought that I needed some rigging practise.  It also seemed like a good time to add the new adjustable outhaul to the sail and see how that worked.


I am told that the idea of the adjustable outhaul is to allow the sail to be adjusted when sailing to deepen or flatten the profile of the sail, making it easier to go deep downwind or hack back upwind respectively.  Hopefully this will help with the Light Wind Speed Sailing Competition!


I had a new adjustable outhaul system from another US sail company and rigged that up to the boom in no time.  I also had a Chinook roller system to add to the clew and that coupled with the smooth dyneema rope has produced a really easy to adjust system.  It even allows for small adjustments, both in and out, with ease.


Pictures below:

The outhaul system: above, it neatly links into the Chinook boom and, below, the neat adjustable strap. (The cleat will be removed as its not needed with this system)

And the finished sail - looks good in yellow:

Full details of the Sails are at:  HSM GPS 2010