Surprise's Log Day Sailer 11750

June Series 4

It seems that I am unable to correctly set up a Garmin GPS 45. I inadvertently set up J.W's receiver to record track data as quickly as it could. As a result, there was no data for Cacafuego this week, except for 782 data points showing her being pulled out of the water after the race.

The data for Surprise is here, however.
Leg1 - Red
Leg2 - Blue
Leg 3 - Green
Leg 4 - Black

There was some good wind tonight although I felt a bit overpowered at times and was unable to depower the boat effectively. I wonder if this is an instance where I should have changed the mast rake setting; I don't know. We had very good pointing the third leg. The data shows us sailing an average angle to the wind of 41 degrees. I felt we were in phase. We had several boards on that leg where we were definitely lifted and then the wind would knock us. We would then tack and find ourselves on a lifted tack again.

I had spent a few hours the previous days working on the forward trailer support for the boat. The solution I have was similar to what Phill Root of fleet 89 in Oregon had. He took a mold of his boat (I used another Day sailer hull) and made a support out of the laid up glass. My result is shown here:

One problem is that when launchng the boat on a ramp I cannot easily step over the support. The width of the tongue is narrow and the width of the frame is even more narrow. Being forced to step over that support from a narrow footing to an even narrower one without falling into the water is daunting. My solution is to secure 2x6 boards on the tongue and trailer frame where I am likely to need to walk.

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

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.

June Series 3

This isn't what I would call a good race from several stand points. First, the wind shifted such that it turned into four beam reaches. No tactics, no strategy, just working the boat speed.

Second, I made a bad choice on the first "downwind" leg by calling for a spinnaker set. As it was, the wind was too far forward to carry. I bore off at the mark to help get the kite up, but that only cost us distance and time. We took the spinnaker down and went from speeds in the 4kt range to a speed just above 5 kts. But, the damage was done, and we we unable to catch the faster boats.

Finally, we had a bad start. I was above a boat and would have been pinched over the line if he hadn't been a nice guy. We also had poor boat speed at the start as well.
For this race, we had a Flying Scot, a couple of Vanguard-15s and a homemade catamaran finish ahead of us. It seems we managed to correct over the latter Vanguard, but I don't know how that worked out. They seemed a long way ahead of us and I was assuming we would be 5th.

The interesting part was that Cacafuego, the other Day Sailer in our fleet took GPS data during the race so I've processed it here.

All speed and velocity numbers are in knots.

In this table, the boat's initial letter is used to indicate which had the advantage.

Since there wasn't much in the way of tactics, I'll note what occurs to me regarding the relative boat speeds. Jim had a better start than we did. His speed was in about 4.3 kts, ours was 2.8. Jim had better average boat speed on legs 1 and 3 while mine was better on legs 2 and 4. I was able to pass Jim during the second leg only because he also tried to set the spinnaker and had troubles with getting it down. It appear that when our boat speed was better was better, it was better by a larger margin. Jim did a good job of sailing to the mark on the third leg. His mean VMG was nearly the same as his mean boat speed.

It will be interesting and fun to see comparisons of this data when we have a real race.

June Series 2

We had plenty of wind tonight, from the southeast. The course was set for a more southerly wind, and it backed before the start. K. sailed with me today and despite her protests that she was out of practice, she did well.
I was a little late to the start, and probably should have sailed for a start at the pin end, seeing that the port tack was the long one. The reaching leg was too tight before the jybe for the kite, and I was glad we had moved the sheets and halyard around before the the race anticipating a set on port tack. Our second beat was very good, we found ourselves lifted even further near the end of it and gained some distance on a boat ahead. We had a minor spinnaker wrap on the second set, but it was cleared quickly, and we had some fine boat speed going downwind.

I had hoped to have a track from the other DS in the fleet, but unfortunately his GPS wasn't set up correctly to record the data. We will try again next week.

June Series 1

I'm not sure what direction the wind was from tonight. It was out of the north which gave us a running start. We got the spinnaker out and managed to hold with the Vanguard 15's. The wind was fairly light, less than 10 kts, and we rounded the first mark just behind two Vanguard 15's. The big concern to me during the "beat" not getting too close to the shore where the wind was disturbed. So, we tacked shortly after rounding to get away from the shore, and shortly thereafter tacked again. Port was so strongly favored that we thought we were going to fetch the mark. But we took a big knock which began to bring us in with the land. Even though port tack was at first still lifted, we decided to tack and get away form the shore. The shift continued, and we found ourselves being lifted 20 or more degrees on starboard tack. The lift wouldn't go away and so we finally tacked to come in just below the port layline. We rounded and set the spinnaker. As we made our way down the course, the wind continued to veer and we found we could no longer carry the kite. So we struck it down and proceeded with the jib on a close reach. The winds were so light and the boat didn't really like it. We could have done with more wind. Rounding the mark we found ourselves needing to tack and did. Again, we didn't want to get too close to the shore so we continued on starboard tack for fear of the disturbed air there. We were obliged to tack once, because a PHRF boat was coming up on us to windward. Rather than lose our momentum in the light air from the big boat wind shadow we tacked and got to windward of her before she could roll us. We continued on and got in closer to the shore near the end and finished the race.
A very challenging race from the standpoint of reading the wind. The large wind shift we experienced during the second leg we handled fiarly well, altohugh for persistent shifts like that the rule is to sailed the headed tack first. I feel confident that if we had done that, the poor wind near the shore would have slowed us down.