Skandia Team GBR

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Day 3 – Successes & what I didn’t do…

So I managed to get the moth out on Sunday, yay, kind of a “Father’s Day treat” outing for me!

The sun was shining, but the breeze was a fluctuating shifty 6-12 knots I would guess, but I’d seen Colin Newman out around lunchtime, foiling a lot but also flopping around as well in the lulls…

I got the boat rigged, spent a little more time looking at the rig and trying to set that up correctly…

Launched, without any issues! So that was a great improvement from last time to just be able to carry the boat into the water and get the thing going.

Wen sailing… the wind had, outside of the odd gust dropped significantly from earlier unfortunately… I did however manage to get a decent few foiling runs done (no photo evidence this time) and was up for a decent amount of time allowing me to start to get to grips with feeling the boat, balance, helm etc and be in control… there wasn’t enough breeze for me to manage to foil upwind properly, but it was nearly there. Also in the really light-‘n-shite stuff I did manage to carry on sailing the boat with a decent level of balance and control so again very promising.

In the “gusts” the boat was feeling well powered up, but they were short and sharp so it was difficult to tweak the rig and body weight to really work out how the thing should be sailed.

Weirdly on port tack I couldn’t get her to foil properly..up, up, up and then a very violent “periscopes up” crash landing… I tweaked the rudder angle and the wand tension a little, but didn’t seem to rectify the issue… we shall have to see what happens in more stable breeze hopefully soon.. So these disturbing “splash-downs” eventually caught me out and as I grew more confident I seemed to capsize more! Still, the technique for getting the boat back up and sailing again quickly seems to be nearly there so I’m happy about that.

So not much to report..

  • I didn't break anything
  • I didn't get frustrated launching or recovering from the capsizes
  • I did have a decent couple of foiling runs
  • I did struggle with tacking
  • I did enjoy myself
  • I do want to go back out there
  • I did get knackered
  • I am still aching!

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