Wow, what a day. I guess the phase of the day is "we learnt a lot"
Today was the first day of racing after the postponement yesterday. We launched in light winds but with an increasing forecast we quickly found our selves flat wiring and fully powered up. With Lucy's limited experience in fleet racing catamarans our start was quite reserved which left us a lot of work to do in the race. The breeze was really shifty and very hard to read, unfortunately we found ourselves on the wrong side of most of it. Also to top it off on the first tack of the race I managed to push the dagger board through the top of the hull meaning it was jammed down, this really didn't help with sailing the boat! race 1 was tricky!
I was determined to make a mends in the second race but again a bad start left us with just too much work to do, and this combined with double tacking on the windward mark and hitting it, lead an awful result. We battled back as far as we could but it just wasn't enough. At least I had fixed the dagger board issue so we didn't have that problem again. On the plus side, during the race we actually felt pretty quick, but just sailing in the wrong direction.
Finally in race 3 things didn't
go quite so wrong, a fairly good start at least put us in the race from
the off, and using our good pace and pretty smooth boat handling we
sailed our first clean(ish) race, fighting with the front of the bunch
all the way round and eventually ending up in 6th.
So an improving day, and I just hope it continues like that. Tomorrow is forecast to be pretty light, but we will just have to wait and see!
We put 100% in today and got given the bad end of the stick a few times, so tomorrow another 100% effort and some good luck and who knows what might be possible!
Cheers All
TP