June 20, 2005
Summer Series 1,2,3
K and I did some practicing for the upcoming North Americans in Huntington Lake, Ca. Here's the plots for the three races:
We had very light winds for the first race; it died out on us during the downwind. There was only one data point taken by the GPS over a distance of 2500 yards and it indicated we had a speed of about 1 knot.
for the second and third races the sea breeze filled in and we had some good races.
Race 2
Race 3
| Summer Series Race 3 | leg1 | leg2 | leg3 | leg4 |
| start time | 13:20:35 | 13:26:38 | 13:30:11 | 13:35:31 |
| finish time | 13:26:38 | 13:30:11 | 13:35:31 | 13:39:48 |
| elapsed | 0:06:03 | 0:03:33 | 0:05:20 | 0:04:17 |
| hours | 0.100833 | 0.059166667 | 0.0888889 | 0.071389 |
| nm | 0.293 | 0.278 | 0.277 | 0.292 |
| mean vmg | 2.905785 | 4.698591549 | 3.11625 | 4.090272 |
| mean speed | 4.932 | 5.236 | 4.717 | 4.679 |
| mean angle | 53.90189 | 26.18644622 | 48.65111896 | 29.05232 |
I tried an experiment during the last race. I intentionally sailed a larger angle to the mark than I normally do on the last downwind leg. The wind speeds were relatively the same during this race and I wanted to see how that affected the performance of the boat. From what I can tell, the hotter angle seems to have been a good thing. We were 44 seconds faster, and our VMG was 0.6 knots faster, which is a huge difference. I want to repeat the experiment and see if we can't duplicate this result. We didn't have much traffic around us; so if we were sailing in a large fleet that could have caused us trouble. That's what makes this game so interesting. Change the number of boats in the fleet; or change the weather conditions even slightly and the outcome can be totally different.