Skandia Team GBR

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Full Foiling Freak…

Went sailing on Saturday, it was looking the greyer but a tad lighter day of the weekend, so I figured my chances of success were higher…

Got rigged up and went sailing in the most breeze I’ve took the Moth out. Launching was fine, and got straight up on the foils, loads of kicker and cunningham and some tension on the wand and the boat seemed pretty stable.

So with a decent breeze the boat really freakin flies, not just in the air on the hydro-foils but also bloody quick, flying past the Y&J fleet and the university boats was great fun!

The breeze was from the North East so it meant my foiling runs were pretty much from the dinghy park and straight across the lake decent enough to enjoy the ride and get used to fore and aft trim and generally being in control a few feet above the bloody waves! It was an awesome experience……until I had to tack… actually first time round I thought I’d just go for it and try a foiling gybe…crap that really didn’t work…I think I know what happened (shouldn’t have bothered trying!?), basically need to be over the other wing mid gybe at the latest… hmm needs a lot more practice.

BTW tacking isn’t much easier… I did nail one or two half decent “learner” tack, not foiling but fast in and pretty quick back up on the foils… The rest of the tacks were bloody wet… I still have so much to learn!

The rest of the time on the water was all good, some great foiling runs, boat feeling pretty stable, high enjoyment factor, no erratic behaviour or anything…. then of course I got pitch-poled… that bloody hurt… and some point the boat bot me and I was bleeding from the finger pretty well… so I went on my final foiling run, trying not to turn the tramps blood-read, capsized near the shore and  swam the bloody things back in…

A decent sail, confidence up, nothing broken… next on my list is to start actually doing more points of sailing, sailing a course etc…

Gutted know one had a camera to get some pics, next time I ain’t going out without a camera-man in tow..

Think I need to start watching a lot of Moth video’s and get learning the technique!

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