3. Sunday Training & Tuesday Breeze!
Been a great week in Catamaran land. Sunday's weekly race training is turning out to be a huge success. Again this week, we had all three club Nacra 500's out on the water. The wind was a steady 6 to 9 knots from the east, allowing us some excellent conditions to run long upwind/downwind races in the outer harbor.
Lessons learned/reinforced
Plan ahead. Always be looking a few steps ahead, as potential opportunities/dangers can be spread out over quite a large distance.
Tacking into dirty air hurts a lot, the Nacra 500 doesn't have dagger-boards and loses a LOT of speed when tacking. Tacking into bad air, then having to tack two more times to get out of it... is devastating.
Boat control, including stalling/starting technique is paramount on the start line.
Tuesday, the wind was very different than Sunday's light joyride. It was a "let the jib cars out, tug on the down-haul" kind of day. The latest recorded wind was 15kn gusting 22kn, with a downward trend on the forecast. Later that evening, I checked the same app (WindAlert/iPhone), to find that the gusts had increased up to 27kn or so. The usual Toronto Northwest winds 20+ degree shifts were very difficult to deal with, given the strength of the puffs.
One thing i'm struggling with is minimizing the leeward slap when coming out of a heavy gust. Think I have a tenancy to head the boat up a little too high during the gusts, and should try to find a happier medium between sheeting and steering.
Lessons learned/reinforced
Always have an out in heavy wind, especially in the shifty gusty stuff. (room windward upwind, room leeward downwind)
When downwind, if the leeward bow starts to plow too much, have crew prepared to let the jib off a touch.
Keep your speed up downwind, so the gusts won't hurt as much. Sail fast and gybe fast to minimize pitching momentum. The simplified reason for this is: If you're going 15kn, and a 25kn gust hits you from behind, you're getting hit with 10kn and can likely react in a timely/efficient manner. If you're going 5kn in the same scenario, you get hit with 20kn (ouch), you will to have to react more severely to avoid a pitch pole.
Been a great week! Water Rats Regatta this weekend, and the fun events surrounding it. In the words of E.Y. "The Water Rats Regatta will feature a showdown between Fred Eaton on his C Class Catamaran and Oskar Johansson on a Nacra F20 Carbon." Exciting Stuff!
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