Consistent crew is key and unfortunately, we have had one 'sub' each time for the past few races, except once. And sooooo grateful to the people who stepped in, it would have been much worse without them!! Still working on this! Ideally, having two rotations of trimmers and Foredeck/Pit would be ideal as well as the ability to have two drivers, ie a crew and a full spare, so we can keep racing very competitively if and when we have to.
This time; strength may have been needed - for instance, we may have gotten the pole too far aft in the pre-feed which meant that the spinnaker filled before it was completely hoisted. And Nat had trouble hoisting fast enough that way. Slow hoists cause wrap and that is what we had on the last hoist on Sunday.
Also, even though we normally handle gybes with just one person, in these conditions, we really needed two people to handle the gybes well. The wind strength was a little too much for one person to be able to make small adjustments, particularly on the pole.
Once Nat gybed around the mark even though the spinnaker wasn't down yet, causing a lot more loss, and extra fatigue for the foredeck crew. Lesson there is that: if there is a problem or a slow maneuver, we need to just keep on and accept that we will be a few seconds late; It is still better than causing havoc and having a slow recovery.
We experimented with the new main which we loved - still because it is so much newer and straighter than the old one, it took some adjusting in terms of main trim and driving. Boat speed was good overall. And we are trying to figure out the best balance between driving high and slow or low and faster; particularly in chop - it is hard to know what is fastest to the mark (we may have faster boat speed but if we fall too low, we add so much more distance that ultimately we are slower to the mark...) Overall both Nat's and Nathan's driving upwind was good, we just need to figure out jib settings to make the boat go best in the chop. Driving downwind has never been a real issue on Elise. Tacks are getting better and better - downwind the maneuvers in heavier winds is the next thing to practice for us.
Good starts overall, once we were over early together with one third of the fleet...
Tatics were good mostly, good calls on the course and we managed to gain one spot mainly by tactical calls. We did short call tactics covering Libra too. As Scott put it: 'a couple of great layline calls and one spectacularly overstood mark.'
