More Spring Keel Photos

We had some really good speed upwind, and very smooth legs - we did two things wrong in the first day and everything else right (as in really good)

1) Tacks (very slow and cumbersome, but it was new crew, so needed to share things out a bit)

2) Calling lines and current management, particularly close to the mark: after THREE attempts at making the windward mark, we finally rounded...we were in the first half of the fleet initially getting there, one before last after rounding...quite exasperating!

I did not make it easy for the boat as our tactician had called lines just fine on the first mark rounding, but I turned way too early, causing us to miss the mark. I can't quite remember what I was thinking, maybe that I needed to work more on my right side tan.

So I would say that we can improve our performance by

1) doing more crew practice and more races with the same regular crew (there was nothing in what happened that cannot easily be fixed by practice, everyone was great)

2) have the driver better listen to the tactician as opposed to making random unilateral decision and stay focused focused focused on boat speed at all times.

3) practice on estimating currents' impact on boat direction, etc...and better calling the marks

Our starts were that bad on the first day (worst was 5 seconds late to the line, which we made up because we had clean air and really good boat speed upwind)

The second day, with the #3 jib up, our tacks were much smoother already - and we had a few bad tactical calls too - one race, we ended up on the wrong side of the course - and a couple of poor mark roundings (leeward gates). So overall, we did not do very well, but most of it was around mark roundings and boat handling on the second day. Boat speed was still great, both upwind and downwind, we were actually passing boats on both sides.

We had good speed downwind, and did play currents well, we actually did pass boats on both upwind and downwind legs, and lost our advantage rounding the marks and calling currents at the marks on the second day, and pretty much tacking and rounding the windward mark on the first day.

Overall, it is pretty disappointing if you just look at this race. And it is soooo tempting to do that (I am guilty of that!)

However, the reason why I have told all the Beethovens to work on a 2-year plan with Elise is so that we don't have to look at one race's individual results. Every race, we have a goal and this is what we are focusing on improving. We can take risks and better ourselves. It isn't practice in that we will do everything we can to maximize our changes to be in a good place, but we will be satisfied if we meet our goal, just an improvement over last time.

Also, because it takes at least a season to train new crew, and so we are hoping to reap the benefits of this in the second year. Elise had only 4 or 5 regular crew last season, and most of these people could not make every race. High crew turnover was definitely hurting our round-the-buoy performance.

There may also have been a 'oh my God, I cant believe we are kicking ass right now and this is our first upwind legs, we just pass 4 boats and we are seriously keeping up and pointing just as high as the top boats'. By the time, we think that, (or well, I think that), my attention is taken away from what I should focus on: boat speed - and perhaps our tactician's attention on what he should focus on: calling the lines.

After the practice with Moxie Man, our goal was to increase upwind boat speed (downwind was never a problem for Elise) AND starts. We didn't have great starts, but we didn't have really bad ones - I would say we had 75% of good starts over the weekend. We stayed out of the way of boats, focused on clean air and boat speed, even if we were sacrificing distance away from the favored end of the line. So from that perspective, we did well.

One other key to winning in my opinion is consistency. We can't just have random bad and good starts. 99% of our starts need to be B+ at least, so that our average moves up.

We will go into the next race without feeling stressed or pressured and will just do our best.

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