July 28, 2005
August Series 1
The winds were a little light yesterday, around 8- 10kts. Kathy crewed for me since my regular crew Joe is off working the Space Shuttle mission. We continued to focus on keeping the boat flat on beats, I had Kathy go up on deck and look at the jib stay sag and slot between the jib and main. I am going to need her to start learning to drive so I can give her the helm to allow me to go up on the foredeck to look. The boat felt good overall but Kathy reported that it appeared the slot between the main and jib was not even. When I tried to adjust it using the barber hauler, the boat slowed down, so I went back to what we had before. I need to check this out some more and make sure I understand.
Last Saturday, Jim W. brought his Day Sailer over and we tuned it up using the methods I learned in California. Today was the chance to try it all out. He was faster, as were we. The two tracks are shown here:
We finished 1:18 ahead of Jim, which is closer than it has been in the past. So I'm thinking this margin will decrease more.
Here's an analysis I did of the first beat.
1st beat:
1 18:25:57: 3426 tacks, 11750 tacks 3 seconds later
2 18:26:42: 11750 tacks
3. 18:28:12: 11750 tacks
4. 18:30:24: 3426 tacks
5. 18:31:30: 11750 tacks
6. 18:32:25: 11750 tacks
7. 18:33:36: 11750 tacks
8. 18:34:03: 3426 tacks
9. 18:35:30: 11750 rounds weather mark
10. 18:35:38: 3426 tacks
11. 18:36:10: 3426 rounds weather mark. (+ 40 seconds)
It wasn't exactly easy to do this, so I didn’t bother for the other legs.
The mean VMG for the boat was:
11750: 3.27kts,
3426: 3.07kts.
Mean speeds for the boats:
11750: 4.77 kts.
3226: 4.50 kts.