Elise : September 2009

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Enjoying a much deserved Thai dinner post delivery

Lorelei is home!!

Captain Heather!

We were figuring out how to put the boom, vang and various other sailing devices in place ;-)

Kevin, Jeff and Heather drinking apple cider - Lorelei had first class champagne :-)

Getting ready to christen the boat

With Heather, Kevin and Jeff

Update on Elise's health

New race #3 is ready for pick up
Outside wood work is mostly done (2 coatings for now, we'll see this weekend if we need a third)
First coat of teak oil on the settee
Replaced broken masthead fly (yet another one...)
Fixed loose instrument connection
Replaced CO2 cartridge for my offshore lifejacket
Serviced the winches
And in the process of changing some worn out cam cleats

Out on Red Sky for Southern Cross

Brian spent a lot of his time playing around with his new toy: the RADAR, discovering an hitherto hidden universe of ships and tugs.

No wind outside the gate, the usual acceleration coming into the gate. Two jibes, a short spinnaker ride. Only one of 3 finishers in our division, we placed 2nd and didn't get back to the dock until 10PM!

Got a sunburnt nose out of the trip ;-) shouldn't have taken a nap with my nose facing the sky

How to choose crew for a long distance race

My humble tips

someone you get along with
someone you trust and who trusts you
someone who is willing to spend time working on the boat with you, so that this person gets to know the boat very well. If something needs to get fixed or if something happens to you (say you're seasick), you want this person to know the boat as well as you do
someone who is handy/engineer-minded (even before being a sailor), both mechanical and electrical/electronic style jobs
someone you have taken on a somewhat long trip before, ideally overnighter, so they get a feel for what it's like and don't decide they want to head back 10 miles into the race. That's partly what qualifying trips help you with
If you have to choose, favor safety (ability to fix things, and navigate the boat safely, even if not competitively) over sailing performance. If you can get both, awesome!
Someone who share the same objective as you do - or if not, make sure it is out in the open and OK by both parties. If you want to race for blood, you may not be happy with a crew member who just wants to go out and do some whale watching.

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.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Long Overdue Post -Nationals Photos

Credit goes to Ralph Deeds

Day 1

http://picasaweb.google.com/ralphdeeds/Express27Nationals2009Day1SantaCruzYCDeedsphotos?authkey=Gv1sRgCIu966exgtz6kAE&feat=email#

Day 2

http://picasaweb.google.com/ralphdeeds/Express27Nationals2009Day2SantaCruzYCDeedsphotos?authkey=Gv1sRgCILo_IHU3_OJew&feat=email#

Day 3

http://picasaweb.google.com/ralphdeeds/Express27Nationals2009SantaCruzYCDay3Deedsphotos?authkey=Gv1sRgCJ-Z-J6tm-HA9AE&feat=email#

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Broken Rudder

After the rudder broke, we tried to keep sailing the boat under sail - after reflection and since Patrick has an inboard engine, it would have been much simpler to start the engine and drop the sails. We called the Coastguard because we were drifting into a shipping channel, just to let them know then proceeded to see if we could hail a boat to get a tow back to a near harbor/dock.