Nice, Hot and Sunny
Today was a quite nice day. We would have liked a bit more wind, and in the morning we were all looking at the water to see if there are any wind ripples. Some people had their doubts, but eventually things turned for the better. The Merlin Rockets are at Salcombe Week, so it was quite nice without them. They tend to behave quite aggressively towards the other classes.
I arrived at the club just after nine and the good Lasers where taken already! It seems people start going early in order to get a good boat. Never mind I am not going to get into that. I took the white Laser and since the club has only three XD kickers and four club boats, a solution had to be found. Last Wednesday someone else had taken the old type kicker. Today it was up to me to go and get the kickers and because I didn’t want people to say that I kept an XD for myself, I decided to give them to the others and I used the old one. Later I found out that it was not complete.
Anyway I rigged the boat and went out. I didn’t have a great start, but it wasn’t bad either. I was doing quite well. I tried to sail heeling slightly to windward rather leeward and since there were no strong winds I decided to try and take advantage of the quirks of the wind. On calm water you can see where the wind is from the ripples on the water. If you are lucky enough, the wind forms a few channels, so you can actually sail within those channels. Sometimes you see “patches of wind”, so it’s a game of connecting the dots. You move from patch to patch by choosing the route with the most and bigger windy patches. So, you don’t necessarily sail straight to where you try to avoid the calm areas. I was actually doing quite well and I had two boats following me and I was close to the one ahead of me. on the last lap, Peter who was astern caught up with me he finished before me, but not too much ahead. So I finished second before last.
The second race was almost like the first. At some point I felt I didn’t have much speed and I was trying to find what the problem was. Since I didn’t find any solution, I thought that maybe the wind had died out a bit. Halfway through the downwind leg I saw weed on the centreboard as it was raised. Then I thought that I had picked up wind. I checked the rudder and I could feel there was weed. I raised it, pushed it back down and they boat gained speed straight away. I had missed half a lap. The rest of the race was quite uneventful and I finished second before last, again.
I didn’t sail in the afternoon, I had to go because I was invited to a BBQ. More racing on Wednesday. See you then.