Heat 3 of Club Championship

Poor turnout for 3rd heat of St George club championship only saw 5 boats start the race. The wind finally co-operated with 12kn from SE.

Dave was 1st around the top mark with good upwind speed as I lost time in a light patch and ‘lowrode’ on the lay line. I got a few nice gusts downwind though and cought right up only to lose it up the next work. I went right to get the ingoing tide advantage but it didn’t pay off.  He extended his lead and I was still in 2nd with Phil some distance behind.

The next reach was quite disastrous for me as I eased connoes in a really light spot, making the bottom camber pop of the mast. I had no choice but to capsize and fix it, and then I heard more popping. Crap, they are all of now!

I wrestled with them for about 10 minutes and couldn’t get them back on with water over the sail, so I limped back in.

Dave won convincingly form Phil and Bruce and Kylie also failed to finish.

The new KA MSL13 sail arrives before Christmas so I’ll probably have to re-visit how many spacers I should use to fix the problem. Looks like in my search for speed with new bits being made every day, I have overlooked some of the more obvious issues.

Latest Alpha for St George

With 4 Alpha design Moths succesfully sailing around, it’s certainly great to see the completion of the 5th hull. This one was built by Mark Wolny and is probably the best one yet.

It’s been work in progress for over 12 months, and will join St George fleet after Nationals.

Big Westerlies hit Sydney

Another 30kn weekend in Sydney saw all races cancelled at St George on Saturday and carnage on the Harbour on Sunday.

I did however get a chance to catch up on loads of boat work and get through 1/3 of my list. The hull now sports Zhik and CST Composites stickers and the boat even has a name. It’s called ‘Ready’. Why ready?…. Well, the fact that I waited for it to arive for 16months has something to do with it and it’s probably a suitable name for a red boat as well.

This Saturday we have yeat another 20-30kn forecast. This time though it will be from the South and should ease later, hopefully in time for the race…

Mothcast with John Ilett

The 3rd Mothcast show has just been uploaded on www.mothcast.net . This one is probably the most interesting so far with loads of Moth foiling history covered…

In the intro of the show, we mentioned some new R&D done for Bladerider, so here is the link for those interested….

http://compositecomponents.blogspot.com/

St George Interclub

Another windy Saturday for St George heat of the Inter-club. We had 13 boats start the race however some expected boats, (one in particular that really should have been there) did not show. Not surprisingly this caused plenty of colourful accusations during the rigging up time. I’d go into more detail as into what they were, but this site is G rated….  :)

Anyways back to the racing, I had a shocker of a start after dropping my tiler in a bare away and subsequently capsized as the gun went. Starting 30sec behind I played catch up. By the bottom mark I was in 4th, with Andrew Stevo leading from Dave and Ben Crocker.

The next 3 laps were some of the best racing I ever had. I reckon the positions changed 10 times between 2-4th as Andrew seemed to stay a steady distance ahead. During the last lap, Dave dropped of after having to fix his centerboard and Ben and I started to Catch Andrew. Up the last work, I was just in front of Ben and tacked late to get out of the 4kn outgoing tide. Andrew slipped back behind Ben and I lead around the last mark. Reach home in 20+ knots was just awesome! I played it safe and Ben finished meters behind, with Andrew 20 sec back in 3rd.

Dave was 4th, then Donosan and Phil wrapping up the top six.

1st Win for the new boat…I’m very happy with that.