Simrad 60 Race Report 2011

Simrad 60

The day started in heavy fog and no wind, motoring out to the start line we were met by a container ship which loomed out of the fog, a hard right at full throttle saw us clear. SSANZ chose to delay the start and wait for the wind. 2 and half hours later we started in light wind ( we weren’t to happy about this because it meant a later finish), I saw Pepe unrolling their code zero on the start line and thought why don’t we have our code zero ready to go, weve had enough time to prepare (my first stuff up of the day), any way we got that up as soon as possible and it turned out to be the ideal sail for the first leg to Gannet. Just after the Motihuie channel, a hole opened up near the rear end of the fleet and we were one of the victims, however, rush and big bikkies fared worse than us as the code 0 creating its own apparent wind gave us an edge, the majority of the fleet however had got the jump on us, from then on it was good sailing with the code 0 until a wind change meant we couldn’t lay Gannet, and we decided to drop it so we could point higher (I actually dot think we were pointing much higher), quite a few boats tacked over but we held our course, and remarkably the wind changed back, we scraped inside Durville rock and could now lay Gannet rock, the code 0 was back up, and it felt like we were clawing our way back into this. After rounding Gannet we put up the masthead kite, and on this leg the winds lightened off again, two boats rounded gannet a fair way behind us. Another wind change meant we were unable to lay Navy buoy with the kite, the shape of the masthead is not good for sailing that shy, with the winds so light the big blue gennaker looked like the go, my turn to make the change and I ballsed it up badly. The gennaker ended up in the drink, and when Bill tried to retrieve it, it ripped across the bottom, so we went back to the code 0, one of the boats behind us had held onto their kite and made great gains on us, in this leg. In hindsight the big blue gennaker would have been the right sail all the way from Gannet (but the wind which was freshening as we sailed towards Gannet and meant to increase did the opposite and died away). Rounding Navy Buoy the wind was beginning to increase finally, and we put in an awful tack with the code 0 to get around, we held onto it for a while, but I was feeling uncomfortable about it, as the wind was getting stronger, and the top of the mast was undoubtably under a fair bit of strain. The Code 0 is very hard to furl in these conditions, but Bill was able to achieve it after about 4 attempts. Then it was two sails to the finish, our original plan was to head to east coast bays to get out of the tide, but best VMG was on the other tack so we headed for Gardiners Gap instead, and made our way down the Rangi shoreline, the tide was robbing us of about a knot of boat speed, and we felt we were on the wrong side as we tacked to the finish. We finished 1 minute behind Suburban Reptile and Rush and came 7th on handicap. Not our best race but we still enjoyed it and are left with the desire to do more 2 handed racing, work on our mistakes and decision making and get better. Unfortunately I will not be sailing in the 100, but looking at the results the 7th hasn’t hurt us to badly and overall we are coming second behind Geralda. So good luck Tom and Bill for the 100 we are still in contention overall.