Spinnaker shakedown

Stacy was back on my boat for a Friday green flag sail.  We opted out of the popular Friday informal racing and took out a Sonar with a spinnaker – for the first time this season!  With the green flag wind, I could take the spinnaker rigging and deploy slowly enough to avoid major mistakes and we flew it okay for a while on starboard.  Success ended with the first jibe however.  The guy came out of the block and blew completely free.  Again, with the light wind, I was able to just pull in the sheet a bit to grab the sail, then the guy, and re-rig it.  This port jibe was the short jibe across the width of the basin so it was time to jibe again before actually getting to attempt to trim the spinnaker and fill it on port.  I jibed and only then saw that while I had re-rigged the guy, I hadn’t kept the spinnaker itself free of tangles and yes, it was hopelessly tangled around the furled jib.  Down, de-rig.  Not enough time left in the day to detangle and re-rig.

Yet another lesson in ways to go wrong with a spinnaker, but at least a good shakedown and refresher.

 

 

Three days

Combined post for three days, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, of green flag sailing by myself, each day just for an hour or so.

Monday the wind was particularly light and it was excellent light air practice.  The sky was cloudy and one of my usual light-air wind indicators, the steam from the power plant, wasn’t distinguishable against the clouds.  The main wind indicators left were flags, other boats, and waves on the water, each only available some of the time.  I noticed a new visual effect.  At times the water would become glassy smooth but then with just a slight increase of wind, it would take on a satiny texture.  Not the millimeter size ripples I usually see, but smaller, too small to distinguish individually, and yet overall with a texture.  Just like satin, this texture would have an orientation.  I set the sails by it, and sure enough, the boat sailed well.  It’s really pretty cool to be able to sail around well with the wind so apparently calm.

Tuesday the Tiller Club had a good turn out for race practice but I didn’t participate.  With my health I don’t have the energy for racing.  Wind was up a little more.  It was still light air but with less of a challenge determining wind direction.

Wednesday the wind was up more, still green flag I think, but strong enough that I opted to sail main-only.

Just three days of quiet solitary sailing.  I’m sailing while I can,

Women’s not-really racing

Checking weather mid-afternoon at work, WR seemed doable.  The flag should be green, although a check at the CBI site showed it inexplicably yellow at the moment.  I went.  I found a nice crowd of women ready to race and green flag with some glassy patches on the water.

Sadly, no Elena though.  A few reported getting an email from Elena saying she wasn’t going to be able to make it.  So what was the plan?  There wasn’t one.  I reminded people that at CZ’s meeting last month reviewing his poll and discussing the future of women’s sailing at CBI, we were told that as an adult program, the dock staff could run races for us.  It was time to ask for that.  I went to dock house and asked.  They said they would see what they could do.  There was a call on the PA for women’s racers to meet, but no sign of any dock staff.  From what I could see, the racers seemed unfazed by the lack of race course or anyone to start races.  They rigged boats and headed out anyway.  The disaster was inevitable.  Of course no one was running races for us.  There were two buoys that may or may not have been set for us, but no starting line, no PRO for us.  No one had any idea what to do, but there was a bigger problem:  The women racers aren’t good at coming together on the water.  They sailed all over the river aimlessly, not near each other, not near potential buoys to race around, just sailing far and wide.

Meanwhile, the wind had been filling in and the flag quickly went to yellow.  Eventually I managed to get close enough to Kathryn to suggest a plan B.  On the dock before going out, Niko had offered to let us use the team racing course if we had no other course.  I suggested we now try his offer.  It would involve chasing down the other women sailors and communicating the plan to find the team racing course.  I had seen Niko go to mid-river so I expected to find him and the course there.  Well, our racers – we seemed to have three or four boats after having potentially more when we met on the dock – came up to mid river, but again seemed to have no inclination to come together, to find the course, or to find Niko.  Niko it turns out was not just starting the team racing but was then following them around the course closely coaching them.  Fantastic for them, but it left me to chase Niko around to see if there would be a time when he could start a race a race for us.  After chasing him around for a while and seeing no women racers following or attempting to come together anywhere.  I decided we should give up on plan B.

Kathryn suggested we go back down river and maybe just play follow the leader around some buoys.  We did for a little while but it wasn’t particularly interesting.  Katheryn then suggested we try racing around some buoys.  There were two pink buoys and two yellow, roughly like

          pink

               yellow


yellow

      pink

The suggestion was to use yellow-yellow as a start-finish line and sail a windward-leeward lap around pink-pink.  Sure, let’s do it, even without starting signals.  It was absurd not-really racing, but it was at least sailing with a little bit of direction.

I think I must be known for making crazy mistakes on race courses and I managed one even in one of these quasi-races.  I was on starboard probably near the port lay line to the windward mark when Kathryn hailed me asking, “where is the windward mark?”  “I don’t know!”  I shouted back, answering honestly.  In the glare of the setting sun, I hadn’t seen it for some time, but was confident that if kept sailing it would eventually pop out of the glare.  Well, I didn’t spot it until I saw Kathryn rounding it a few boat lengths downwind of me.  I spun the boat down, but on port now, I was going to have to wait for her (on starboard) to cross me to leeward.  As she passed I saw I was going to be able to still lay the mark staying on port, although running dead downwind – yes, to the windward mark.  Trina and Marsha were approaching on starboard lay, but I judged I would have time to round ahead of them.  Wrong.  I had failed to allow for my crew’s ability to handle the jib and we couldn’t accelerate fast enough.  Trina and Marsha had to luff above close-hauled to avoid me.  18.3 foul on my part right there.  They said later that they were so impressed with my boat handling and my ability to get ahead of them but I said no, it was my bad and that I had fouled them.

Sailing with me this day was Janet.  I hope I didn’t scare her away from women’s racing.  She took the tiller at first, but I ended up taking it as the wind grew stronger.  I also complained and criticized others…

Just informal instruction

Spacing out my sailing days, and trying to pick green-flag days that won’t tax me too much, I picked this Monday.  If I remember, flag was green when I arrived at the dock after work but went yellow just as I was ready to go out.  Also just as I was walking to the dock house to check out a boat, they called on the PA for someone to give informal instruction.  Perfect.

Thomas had just got his green rating and was eager to learn what he needed for yellow.  The just-yellow wind today promised to be good for that.  We rigged mainsail-only for the experience he would need for his yellow test.  Unlike last Thursday with Allison, I loaded Thomas with many tips on sailing, details of going through maneuvers, and theory.  For feel, I tried to get him to sense the extra pull that comes when flow attaches to the sail, and I pointed out the times the boat slowed when the flow detached. He was eating it up and wanting more.

“How many more times will I have to sail before I take my yellow test?”  “Mmm, twice,” I boldly answered.  You need to go out with another person to get tips from them.  With informal instruction, you’ll get different advice from everyone.  Another person will tell you totally different things than what I’ve told you today.  You’ll have to figure out what works for you.  Then at least one day you’ll want to practice on the test course by yourself…

He didn’t know about the test course so I described it, and urged him to sail us from mid-river where we had spent most of the afternoon to closer to the dock to see if there was a test course set up.  No, there wasn’t.  Several racing programs, including a big youth regatta, were going on at the same time and all CBI buoys were incorporated into race courses.  No matter, there were two pink buoys, probably set as a starting line or leeward gate (although now badly skewed) that were relatively unattended.  “Here, I’ll show you” and I took the tiller to show how he would have to sail around buoys for the yellow test.  I talked through windward and leeward mark roundings, tacks and jibes between the marks and staying close to the course.  I didn’t mean to impress him but he was blown away.  “Wow, you had the boat going so much faster than I ever did!  How did you do that?  Is the wind stronger now?”  Huh.  I don’t know.  To not take credit for sailing better, I agreed the wind was up.  The wind was up slightly, but not a lot.  It’s possible that the quick succession of maneuvers just seemed exciting, or stirred up more bow noise.  It’s also possible that a big difference was my boat handling that maintained speed through the maneuvers.  (He, for example, didn’t have Allison’s Hobie-Cat sense of maintaining speed.)

Anyway, the sun was getting low, I had packed his head with far more information than he would be able to remember, and at the end there, had given him a boat handling goal to work toward for his yellow test.  We headed in.