Elise's First Race Under New Management

Berkeley Circle, Nov 11, one design event
Crew: Nat (driving), Nathan (foredeck), and Jens+Amy on trim

Summary:

It was a very encouraging first day (one race, one design around the buoys). We made substantial improvements each leg on trim, speed, and pointing. The results haven't been posted yet but we're probably lower middle. Sail handling (sets, douses, ...) went well.

Details:

Wind was light-medium. A few gusts and sustained puffs made things interesting but in general it was enough breeze to keep moving but not so overpowering as to make it difficult the first day out.

We sailed under 3DL #3 and dacron main, the latter short one batten (the top one). At the starting line, the fleet was split in jib choice.

The course was a simple Olympic (triangle, then windward leeward) with all marks to port including starting pin and finishing pin.

The arrival at the start line was too late to really inspect the line and set up properly, but we still had enough time to pick our spot on the lnie and get set up for a reasonable start. This positioning was a pretty standard committee boat end, starboard tack affair. During the final stages of the start, Nat did a reasonable job with two fairly aggressive people hollering different directions at her (Jens and Nathan).
We had a good start all things considered- todo for next time is to be closer up to the line and drive anyone who's in the way over early.

Immediately after the start, we began to suffer on speed and didn't have driving and trim properly coordinated. We gradually lost distance to the boats we'd started with, and had a little trouble pointing high enough (particularly surprising given our #3 versus the #1 (#2?) some of the
nearby boats had selected). This upwind (first chance to tune against other boats) and the following downwind was where we lost most of our distance.

We had a good spinnaker set at the mark which only suffered a bit from the lack of practice on spinnaker setup (we should have, but didn't, have time to run through at least one set and gybe before the race).

Speed downwind was good, but the course was very unsteady on the first two downwinds (out to the offset and back from it to the leeward mark).
Todo for next time is to give the driver a compass bearing after rounding each mark.

The gybe execution was reasonable, but needed better communication fore and aft about when the pole was made on the mast again (and coursekeeping during the gybe- we wound up too high coming out).

The second half of the first downwind (offset->leeward) was puffy and a tight reach. If we'd had our act together from the beginning, the kite was carryable, but we wound up falling seriously off course to leeward and had to drop. The drop was conveniently facilitated by the halyard coming loose and dropping the spinnaker in the water. Fortunately, no
shrimping resulted (simply wet from being dragged across the surface while half full of breeze). Todo for the next event is to use a velcro strap around mast and halyard just below the cleat (which is vertical on the mast so that the bowman can run everything without help from the pit).

The second upwind was much improved over the first in both boatspeed and pointing. We had a few boats close to compare against (particularly Taz). Todo for next time is to be faster on the coordination of trim and helm to get acceleration from puffs. We had a few solid puffs that just resulted in big heel and Nathalie applying the rudder liberally, slowing the boat down.

The second downwind was straight down, and had clean sail handling. We were playing a long catchup game, and had the chance to play with one boat (Attack from Mars?) to practice sitting on their air, a game we need to practice a bit more.

During the final upwind, we had much better coordination and speed. We made a smart move going right a bit to stay out of the current, resulting in a dramatic pin end finish cutting off three port tackers who had been well ahead of us.

Overall, it was a very encouraging first day out.

Nat: unless you see pulsing arterial blood leaking from one of the crew, whatever else is going on is not more important than steering a consistent course. The two-handed traveler+tiller interplay is the main thing to work on upwind.

Amy: If you don't know what a request means, let us know fast and loud. Be assertive about it. Also, bow and trim#2 need to be out on the rail instantly after the tacks.

Jens: you and I needed to talk more about setup, especially Amy's parts- we didn't adequately prepare her coming in to marks.

Nathan: it's possible to be a lot more efficient about bow setup to avoid moving weight around too far off the rail coming in to windward marks.

Tuning:
The #3 seemed to like the leads pretty far forward- up at the shrouds. We need to number the holes in the track for future reference.
We need to experiment with the main. We had a considerably
tighter leech than our competition in the puffs (might want to allow the top to fall off). We'll also check it out when we have a full crew- being short some rail weight hurt us a bit at times.

-Nathan