A "better" race

Dragon lady was not available so the Race committee had to use fixed marks. There was good wind from the north north west. Gilbraltor to Dufferin worked. We once again opted to use the jib due to the brisk wind. We did not plan on using the chute.

We had another bad start. About a minute to go we were located a few boat lengths astern of Grand National. My idea was to force out boats to windward. For some reason, we were slow to power up. Windburn overtook us to windward. We opted to go on port tack and head off on our own away from the fleet.

The wind made for difficult to manoeuvre . In heavy wind conditions, crew has to stay on the rail until we are head to wind; and then must quickly and adroitly (?) ‘scamper’ to the new windward side. I tried to slowly tack; to give everyone time to move. There was a conflict with the theory of crew placement and the ability of crew to move ‘quickly and adroitly’ when the boat was head to wind. My response was to utter sotto voce 'get ready' to the jib trimmer, so as to keep the rail crew uninformed. I tried to keep things on a need to know basis. This didn’t work. The crew got wise to my modus operendi and starting to move as soon as they saw the trimmer start to set up. Theories once again are just theories!

In spite of this conflict between proper and practical procedures, we had a good upwind leg. I kept the main sheet uncleated. It was difficult to hold but it allowed me to trim given slight changes in wind strength. There was little change in direction; more a problem of velocity.

On the first downwind leg we didn’t fly the chute. There was a discussion about whether we should. I felt that we could. Once we had a consensus to possibly use the chute on the next downwind leg, the crew set about setting the lines. There was a bit of a problem to figure out the lines. We did use the chute on the second downwind leg but, there were unresolved line issues and it wasn’t completely powered until we were 2/3rds on the way home.

The conditions were more challenging than last week. It was not the no wind drift of last week. All in all I found this was a better race.