Greetings racing fans,

Today we finished competing in the 470 North American Championships, a four day event held out of Bay View boat Club in San Francisco Bay. Several of the top teams in the world were there. The women’s fleet was 16 boats and the men’s fleet was about 30-40 boats. Due to the larger fleet sizes, the women and men raced separately. We had good breeze and relatively flat water with few waves to ride every day of the event. We were very excited for this regatta as we had our new coach Pease Glaser working with us and felt she would provide some valuable help.

Day one was a building breeze, starting in about 10 knots and building to 15-18. In the first race we were going well upwind and rounded in second at the top mark and held our position on the reach leg but then struggled on the down wind leg. Several people broke high and we didn’t think they were gaining by doing that but when they reached back to the mark they were ahead. A similar story happened in the second leeward leg. But due to good upwind speed we were able to finish 5th. It was a solid finish for our first race. For the second race the breeze was building and we depowered the boat by raking the mast back and adjusting our mast bend. We found our fast forward speed was a little off the pace with the leaders. The wind continued to build throughout the race. Our downwind heavy-air boathandling was a little rough since we have never sailed in more than 15 knots together as a team yet. We came out of a jibe high and the boom hit the water- we flipped over. We got the boat back up fairly quickly since we got on the centerboard as the boat went over. The spinnaker was wrapped around the shroud a bunch of times. Alice went up in the rigging to unwrap it. Just as she was getting the last wrap off we hit a bad wave and flipped with her up the mast. This time neither of us got on the centerboard. Since we had recently Tefloned the bottom (a boat bottom buffer/lubricant), we weren’t able to get on the board quickly and it took a while to get the boat upright. When we finally got it up, Alice went back up the mast and finished unwinding the tangled spinnaker. We finished the race in 15th. After the race we tuned up our speed with our coach and flattened the lower section of our main sail and moved our jib leads forward reducing twist. Both of these changes were a better setup for flat water. We were ready for the next race that never happened. We were scheduled to have 3 races but only had two due to delays in setting the course with moving tankers in the middle of the course. Eventually the race committee sent us in, anticipating the tankers would take a while to clear out of the course.

Day two was similar conditions to day one but with about 2 knots more wind velocity. It proved to be a frustrating day learning that several of the purchase systems in the boat had not been properly rigged for heavy air. The boat we are racing was new before the Olympic Trials in the Fall of 2003. However, in the training leading up to the Olympic Trials, that event, and the 5 regattas we have sailed since then, have all been in 15 knots or less wind. So, on day two as the wind got up to 18 knots with puffs of 20 and we raked back the mast to 2 full shroud pin hole settings, the systems in the boat were put to the test. Our cunningham block bottomed out underneath our centerboard trunk, so we couldn’t fully depower to the max on tight reaches. Additionally one of the Cunningham cleats wasn’t holding the line and was slipping on the reach. This is a leg of the course we usually pass people, so we had to settle for going the same speed. The second problem, our largest, was that the vang was set up as a 6 to 1 purchase in the cascade on the boom, with another 2 to 1 system under the centerboard trunk. This was not enough for Erin to easily get tension on and in large puffs was completely unable to get enough tension. The third problem was several of the line take-up systems in the boat weren’t used to taking up so much line on tight systems and there was a lot of extra line that was loose in the boat to get tangled in things. This resulted in some lines getting pulled when they shouldn’t have been and others getting uncleated at the wrong moment. In the three races, we had moments of speed but overall it was a rough day. We had some deep finishes. A contributing factor to our frustration was that our downwind was unsuccessful. There were a lot of “mode” changes. Sometimes it was fast to sail sharper angles downwind when other times it paid to go straight downwind. It depended on whether you could make up the downwind distance by sailing angles if you could get the boat going fast enough to pass waves. This was tricky. We tried several modes with not a lot of success. We spent some time on land discussing what we had learned about what did and didn’t work downwind and felt we had gained a lot of new knowledge that we could apply going forward.

Day three began with getting down to the boat park early. We had a lot of boat work to do. Pease helped us to assess the best solutions to our problems. We re-rigged the vang purchase system to an 8 to 1 system in the cascade off the boom and left the old system below the centerboard trunk. We re-rigged the cunningham to allow for it to be tightened without bottoming out. This involved sewing in an extra line segment into the existing line to lengthen the line by about 1 foot. We also adjusted the bungee take-up systems. Alice also removed the cunningham cleats and gave them a work-over to make sure they would work. We got out to the course to test our new systems. The vang lines required some adjustment to align their lengths. In race one we were second at the top mark and held second until the last downwind leg. There was a large wind shift that didn’t go in our favor and a lull in wind on our side of the course. Three boats passed us and we finished 5th. For the second race it got a little windier, increasing from 8-10 knots to about 10-12 knots. We made a couple sail adjustments and were ready. We started to leeward of the fleet in a boat favored start. The breeze looked good left and we keep going that way. We played several shifts later in the beat and rounded first. We had some good spinnaker sets and good jibes and tactics and held on to cross the finish line in first. Much to our surprise there was no gun as we crossed the finish line. We soon found our we were OCS (over the line early) at the start. This gave us 17 points instead of a first. A huge bummer but we knew we had sailed well. The next race was a similar story. We were first around the course until the second to last leg where one boat passed us. We finished second. It was a solid day. We had made some huge improvements in our speed and boat handling.

Day four, today, was a very shifty day with a lot of wind velocity changes. For the first race we anticipated the wind to build and depowered the sails. At the start the wind wasn’t as windy as expected and this caused us to have bad point. We were forced to tack for clean air and go right. With poor point and poor wind pressure on the right side of the course, we were looking badly. It got worse when a big left shift came in. We rounded the windward mark deep in the fleet. It was too much for us to catch up very much throughout the race and we only caught one boat. For race two we set the boat up for lighter winds and had better speed. We also went left on the course learning from the first race. We rounded the top mark in 3rd and held that position on the first downwind leg. On the second upwind leg we made our move. We hit some good shifts and moved into second just ahead of the third place boat and right behind the first place boat. On the tight reach it was quite windy and hard to lay the mark. Our good reaching speed showed its colors. We were able to increase our lead on the third place boat and overtake the lead and move into first. The downwind leg made for similar conditions as day 1 and 2 where angle sailing was important. We used what we had learned and went “half wild,” a term used to mean sailing downwind with the crew trapezing to windward and the skipper sitting to leeward. We held our lead to the leeward mark, and reach to the finish to get the gun! A great end to the regatta. We felt we had really put together a lot of new skills and oiled out some kinks in our boat systems.

We sailed the boat the 1 hr 45 min. sail to St. Francis Yacht Club after racing today to move it to where the World Championships are being held. It was a fun sail, under the Bay Bridge, and past Alcatraz, and stopping just in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. Pease met us with our dolly to take the boat out. She was then off to the airport to fly home. She comes back on Saturday before the World Championships. In the next few days we’ll go for a couple of short sails and make sure the boat is ready. We are excited to use a new set of sails soon as our current set has seen better days. Measurement and registration for the Worlds begins Friday and continues through Sunday. The practice race is on Sunday with racing beginning on Monday and ending the following Sunday.

Thanks for all of your support and encouraging emails!

Cheers,
Erin & Alice