Practice Day on Elise

Last Saturday the Elise team went out on a practice session to practice key maneuvers

 Raising a glass, seen performed here by Elise's bosun

 Working the hand-cranked blender in heavy seas (simulated by the stampede up on deck as Suzanne shifts her weight from port to starboard and Nathan pulls the boat one way to simulate heel)

Drinking in precarious conditions

 

while maintaining a strong sense of style

Sleeping

It was a very tiring day.

More seriously, we had about 15 to 20 knots out on the city front and we practice tacking with the jib and mainly gybing. The sets and douses were obviously also practices but we did as long a downwind and then upwind legs as we could thus limiting these two maneuvers to the bare minimum to get the gybes in.

We had two rotations going and we did a pretty good job at everything - tacks were smooth and fast and gybes happened without any hair rising incidents :)

Photos courtesy of Nat and Serge