Elise's performance a little compromised

At the Nationals, a few things impacted Elise's performance. First, Heather and I had taken out of the boat everything we could after our 24 mile qualifying run for the Long Pac. Unfortunately, Heather's car wasn't as big as we had originally thought and a lot was left on the boat. Over the course of the Nationals, much had yet to be taken out of the boat to give it a competitive weight. Weight in a one design race is particularly unforgiving.

Then, there is a problem with Elise's rig - which primarily affects performance - that was spotted by our rigger, Jason. It looks like the mast is slightly bent, probably a result of the aft lowers being too tight at some point with the backstay released. The rigger has since seen 3 other Expresses with the same problem. He has discussed this with Buzz Ballenger who has made a lot of these rigs and both have alerted the fleet to this problem, since all the boats looked at tuning numbers from the E27 website. Those are correct I guess if you don't plan on releasing the backstay...

This means that Elise is slower. The solution (other than waiting for the rig to die of natural causes) is to try to physically unbend it. Unfortunately this was met with a less than 50% success rate on Ballenger's benches. So probably best to live with a slight loss in performance, most noticed upwind and in one design races.

Other than that - and these are not excuses, but when things are not as good as they can be, I find it helpful to understand why so I can take action and correct whatever can be corrected. Also helps me figure out what is likely to yield best results hence probably something I can focus on first. Based on discussions with other winning boats at the Nationals, here are a few hypothesis and things we can try:

• Weight (already discussed and most of it was due to bad timing)
• regular crew and regular practice: this helps loads as maneuvres happen faster, smoother and crew stays fresh longer!
  
• think about dedicating a main trimmer (as opposed to having the driver do it)
• think about rigging the backstay so it can be adjusted by the main trimmer
• don't worry about slamming into the waves (the other methods is to have the bow come down slightly with the wave but it increases distance sailed)
• don't worry about pointing too much, focus on increasing boat speed
• good sails (in our case, #3 needs to be changed)
• practice starts - to get clean air/good position. A lot of the race will depend on your start assuming mighty competition

The boat will definitely be lighter. We can try to see if a dedicated main trimmer would help ( downside would be that the trim won't happen as fast as the driver might be best able to feel the need for a small change). Elise is getting a new blade. And this season, we will focus on building and training regular crew, and find races for a full crew to have a lot of fun.