Saturday, October 3, 2009

NQR - Day 3

We left the dock this morning in about 8 knots from the NE, with our mast set up for light air. By the time we got to the course a short sail away, it was 14 knots. We pinned down to our medium air setting as it got windier. We started the first race and right off the line fell into the boat above us. We attempted to tack out to clear our air, but the jib got stuck and then so did I. The boat capsized on top of me while Liz jumped over onto the centreboard, where she promptly fell off because we had buffed the boat to a shiny finish on Tuesday. This was of course witnessed by the entire laser fleet. We got the boat up and went blasting off to the right side of the course, where there was more wind (which we didn't need) and big waves which threw water into our faces. At some point the boat and I lost contact while I was trapezing and I flew through the air and then slammed back into the boat still on trapeze, much to Liz's amusement. Once around the top mark we shook the water out of our eyes and put up the spinnaker. All was going well until a gust hit and the kite went soaring to windward. As the boat capsized to windward Liz again flew through the air. Since we were already losing the race we took our time getting the boat up, attempting to douse the kite. Unfortunately the kite had wrapped itself around the port spreader and trapeze line, so we sailed back to the dock to untangle it and set our mast up for heavy air. We headed back out having missed a race and changed our mast set up again, as the wind had now died down to 10 knots.

We had three more races during which we managed to get off the starting line and keep the boat upright. The breeze was up and down, so we struggled a bit with changing gears and getting our boat speed up. We did managed to make some good tactical decisions both upwind and downwind and were in 4th for quite a bit of the last two races.

It was a long day on the water and everyone is pretty exhausted. Although we didn't finish two races, we didn't damage any of our equipment or ourselves during our capsizes, and managed to come back and sail some good races. The forecast for tomorrow is 20 knots from 7am to 7pm so hopefully we survive that as well!

No comments:

Post a Comment