Our first season was a lot about putting the basic in place, both in terms of equipment as well as crew maneuvers. We have done a pretty good job at that. Now it's time to get boat speed up. I noticed that we had problems pointing with the #1 in light air, and maintaining good boat speed relative to the rest of the fleet with the #3 in heavier air.
A great aspect of the E27 fleet is that everyone is very open to sharing their expertise. I guess that the more boats move up in capabilities, the better off the fleet is as a whole. It will make racing much more interesting for everyone. So the owner of Xena gave me some great tips and helped me understand what might be causing Elise to be slow. Here are a few things that we will change in the very near future...including full-crewed lightship race.
For the boat we will:
- maintain low halyard tension on the #1 to optimize the combined draft of genoa and mainsail
- tune up the rig tension (using fleet's preferred settings as a reference)
- get the speedo to work (this means hooking it up to the battery...)
and as a team we need to:
- hike out more, think twice before leaving the rail...and try to do most activities from the high side. Or in light winds, be very attentive to weight distribution to keep a 7-10% heeling angle
- have the bow person call out traffic and waves to avoid maximum disruption caused by the nasty choppy Bay lanscape
- have the trimmer or the driver play with the backstay upwind - perhaps more so than with the main sheet and traveler.
- practice tacks to make them a lot faster both with #1 and #3 up
Some of the regular Elise's crew are also running to be part of a race program. There's something wonderful in going through this learning curve together.
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