Today was an emotional day for us. Our beloved grandmother passed away early in the morning, leaving us rather solemn and not too motivated to go sailing and attack the day. We pushed through it and ended up out in Bay and realized it was windier than we had previously thought and that just going through the motions was not going to cut it...so we got down to business and focused on the task at hand. It ended up being one of our best ever training sessions in a cracking (15-22) NW'er out on Biscayne Bay.
For the first time in breeze we had good upwind speed with our training partners and managed to not flip in some tricky conditions. We believe a big key to the speed today was the coordination between Jesse on the rudder and myself on the mainsheet, we believe this relationship is steadily improving and as we get more consistent at perfecting it, our speed will get more and more consistent in this breeze. It requires complete focus to keep the boat flat and the wings just skipping above the waves; the margin of error with the trimming is small because you can easily either undertrim (often the main is flogging over 20kts) and heal to windward and send us water skiing or let the boat heal over and stall the rudder, draining precious boatspeed. Also we were very happy with our rig tune, using our friend's new mast. Our new mast is en transit and should be here next week!
We were also using our buddy's spare boat and it seems to be quite stiffer (understandably so because it is 7 years younger - 2000 vs 2007), which allows the boat to accelerate much more in puffs and is a more stable platform. It also holds the rig tension better because the boat doesn't bend. On a day like today, it was just nice to be in a newish boat and see some of the fruits of labor (70 days of sailing since august) come to light. We hadn't really seen much of it in the old boat and were starting to get a little frustrated with our sailing because we were not seeing much results. A sail like today, in those perfect conditions, with our speed, does wonders to alleviate those inner-ego musings that haunts any athlete when they are not performing to where they want to be. Thank you Jonny and Charlie for the boat usage! We will be fine in the old boat in OCR and will look forward to getting back in our newer boat (2009) in Mallorca in March!
Check out late in the video, as you see our buddy and training partner, Alex Bishop eject from his 49er after a spinnaker set goes bad quickly...common occurrence in this boat!
Sorry the camera moved a little bit from its original angle, so the wide angle is up and down, not sideways...next time hopefully.
This video is dedicated to our "Gammy" and we thank her for showing her support today. R.I.P.
better version of the video is on facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/video/video.php?v=637579468488&oid=142545262465343&comments
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