berkeley Mindwinters - Mark's writeup - or how practice really helps

And focus - one of those days...

Crew:

Nat: helm/main trim

Nathan: tactics/pit

Michiel: foredeck

Mark: downwind trim

Suzanne: upwind trim

"Our first 3 or 4 tacks  were very poor.
 
The next few were ok, as we switched to cross-sheeting  and got some of the bugs worked out.  Tacks were still slow, but mostly because the Genoa was not getting helped around the mast.  After that was corrected, we did fine for a while, then really messed up the last upwind and it was pretty much because someone was standing or sitting on the lazy sheet on many of the tacks.  Our technique was just bad.  Didn't have anything to do with whether we cross-sheeted or not, and the fact that we were using the lower winches.
 
Note: how good our first downwind leg was (we did a half-dozen gybes on the way to the race course!   We did zero practice tacks with the #1 and any kind
of wind (we motored in) - note how aweful our start and first half of the upwind leg were!"

the truth is that we had a bad start, starting a few minutes after everyone else. We had a bad first half upwind, struggling to find the groove in light air. We had a very good mark rounding and first downwind. Great tactics and great gybes got us a few boats. We had a good second upwind, and a very bad downwind (tactical bad only, we tried to replicate what we did but the wind shifted on us) and a really bad mark rounding. Called the jib up/spinnaker douse at the wrong time causing us to be at the mark without a jib up!!! And driver left too much room for an inside boat (with overlap) causing one boat to pass us.

 

Green leg is leg #1 (upwind) and #2 (downwind), yellow is #3 and #4, and orange is #5. Driving looks pretty straight, however, it looks like we're going backwards at the start!