Today wednesday the 20th may we sailed the club race with a totally new configuration and the crew experience was basically that three of four were very fresh in their roles. Although Siri has quite some experience now it was the first time on the fordeck.

It was a fresh breeze maybe 6-8 S/M and the boat handling was quite demanding with 3 spinnlegs. Except a serious error in navigation which brought us from the leading pack to the trailing end of the Expresses it all in all went without big errors. A lot of commmunication was needed, but the spinnaker sets went really smooth and two of three take downs went nicely as well. Even some of the jibes were acceptable.

It was a great learning afternoon and everybody was very happy. Preben watch out your kingdom on the foredeck is threatened!!!

All crew did a geat job but the hero of the day must be Siri.

We thought we had a good start on the line but check the video. Actually we were 20 secs late!!! The video starts with the one minute signal.

Here are some images:

Who forgot the fender??

Thats better, minutes to start.

Sekonds to start!

And after rounding 6 three times and Zero two times we are at the finish.

Free flying or.... ?

Spin is down and we sail to the dock. A great wednesday afternoon!

Thanks for a great day on the fjord.

And a great result. 5th overall of 35 boats.

The fight between the three leading express boats was great.

I made a video from some of the footage. Unfortunately the real action was not cought. But the video to my mind shows that we have a lot to learn. We should sit together and go through it. Basically the boat handling sucks :) sorry to say so but its the truth and i include myself in this. We need an instructor helping us to get the things right.

The good things is that we have boat speed to challenge the best in the club. On sailing upwind we are faster than the rest of the bunch. i will try to find out what is the explanation. The guyas at impuls say they dont know how we do it and they cant sail that high as us because of their genua. So it might be our genua that is cut flatter.

On the downside we have less speed on the reach and downwind. dont know why, we need to find out this

BSF race 1 spring series 2009. Lane 16 (4 8 port 4 starboard). Wind 5-8 m/s west.

Elisa and me sailed double handed on the first event in BSF spring series. As skipper for the first time in BSF, the nerves was a bit shaky. The wind was not in our favour, it was blowing a bit too much. Allthough not as much wind as on tuesday, it was more than enough to shake our nerves. Mostly due to the wind shifting violently in the narrow sound - this is a typical event on westernly wind at the start line in BSF. The wind runs through the sound in a different direction than the overall wind direction (westerly). This creates turbulence and wind shifts and the wind appears to come from all directions. The strenght of the wind is also pulsating - some times strong - some times weak. This effect is caused by the topographic and then again by the different wind direction in the sound and outside the sound.

We had a resonable good start. We started a bit out on the start line (closer to the buoy than shore), to try to have more even wind. We managed to gain a quite few meters on Calypso but there where a few expresses wich started closer to shore than us and they managed to get a head (closer to shore ment shorter way to rounding at 4 - south of southern skjærholmen). We had the lead on Calypso for a couple of hundred meters, but they soon gained pace and sailed faster. Somehow they seem to gain more power from their main sail than we did - we had the main sail trimmed more centered, but they managed to have it more leeward without loosing power - I have seen this before but I don't quite get it. I guess they also had more power in the jib as they could ride the boat down more efficiently.

We cornered buoy 4 (south of southern skjærholmen) and made a gybe with the wind now in from port. This created a small problem of raising the spinn as it was configured for a port lift as usual. This ment that we had to do a lo hoist - trowing the spinn behind and in front of the jib. We managed this perfectly, and all went in a very controlled way. The jib stayed up all the way to buoy 8 (one less thing to think about as we where short handed). We actually managed to gain some distance to calypso which was closest. Perhaps to more speed duo to the jib? Now for one of the intersting part. As we where short handed we saved the spinn on leeward side (starboard) into the cockpit. Not a regular way to do it, but easy as we where short handed. It also made it more easy to hoist it on the next leg towards goal.

On the second jib leg towards bouy 4 we didn't manage to ride the boat down so we lost pace with the other boats. We raised the spin after cornering 4 again - now with the spinn on the correct side (starboard) behind the jib. As the wind shifted quite a bit the skipper became a bit nervous and steared into the wind to prevent an uncontrolled brouch. All speed lost. Spin down. Sailing with main sail and jib. 100 meters or so more we hoist the spinn again and did fairly well to finish. The correct thing to do would be to fall off to the wind to hide the spinn behind main sail and jib to create less heeling of the boat. Also the spinn leward rope could be loosend to create more foreward speed than heeling - well it went a bit fast for us both.

We ended up 8 of 10 boats in our class (preliminary results). We where happy anyway - we managed to handle the boat well even in a bit rough conditions (for short hand sailing), and we did a few good handling decisions.

Thanks to Elisa for beeing brave and participate in this event! Short handed sailing is for the brave!

Preben

The tuesday sail in OSF was great. Fresh briese and real action. Wind was north-west probably 8 sek/m

Elise, Mona and Preben were crew. As always the olympic course sailing (pølsebane) against other Express is as cool as it gets. After a terrible Fuckup with the first spinn takedown in the first race the instructor in his RIB apparently felt sorry for us and spend quite some time to help us.

The best moment was when we were rounding the top mark after first leg in second race leading the pack. We were early going towards Nesodden. This was definitely the favourable side.

Our upwind speed seems good, the log hit actually 6.6 but it shows probably a bit too much.

To summarize some of the tips we got from the trainer:

1. spinn take down in these winds should be done with wind almost aft.

2. remove boom before take down

3.when sailing with spinn even in these winds he suggested to put weight forward to get the rear out of the water

4. Lifting the boom slightly lets you sail more downwind (platt)

5. The spinnakker trimmer is actually stearing the boa. When ever there is less pressure he/she should ask the driver to sail sharper. when there is a lot of pressure she should tell him to fall off. This should be contineaous communication.

I probably forgot stuff but maybe some of the others remember.

The onboard cam works fine only the sound is weird. it gets all the sounds from the hull and non from the air :)

download video here  >>>>>