Blog

Today saw the first race proper for the worlds, with a 77 boat fleet from countries as far afield as Chile to Belgium. It was windy as today, a big surf to get through when leaving the beach. Its good that the beach is very soft sand, it means that you dont have so much of a worry when you are getting into the surf. At least the boat doesnt get too scratched and at least everyone is in the same position.

The conditions looked worse than they were and on the Hugh wind speed guestimation gauge i think it was 15 – 25 knots depending on gust or lull. However, the waves were whoppers, with the downhill ride being a full roller coaster affair. it often felt like it was too full on. I had a number of situations where i thought we just couldnt avoid the next wave on the downhill ride. We would pile headlong into the next wave, everything would load up, stretch and if it was a really big wave Tom, my crew would stagger forwards a bit. Fortunately for him he was held firm by his chicken line (retaining line, attached to the rudder fittings to stop him getting thrown forward during a nose dive).

We were a bit unfortunate with our race as we approached the leeward mark getting the kite down, it went over the front of the pole as we turned into the wind. This lead to all sorts of issues as we couldnt get the kite down after that and had to retire from the race. Gutted.

Back on the beach we heard of tales of woe as the stories of peoples wipe outs and crashes spread like wild fire. It was a day with a few injuries to people and boats, but fortunately most of the injuries were only superficial and the boats have all been mended now and will be fine for the morning. We have a 4 race schedule tomorrow, first start 10am. it will be a good busy day as the forecast is for at least as much wind as today. Hopefully people will have learnt how to deal with the conditions better and we will get more races in. It was probably good for most of the fleet that racing was abandoned after the 1st race, breakages could then be fixed.

We decided that a bit more practice was in order for Tommy and I to get used to the Nacra we are sailing here. It was the boat handling we needed to get sorted. So we went out and did another hour of tacking, gybing, windward and leeward mark roundings. This was great as it made us sort out the routines, especially for the windward and leeward marks. I came off the water feeling like we had really pushed ourselves on and have made some big gains for our racing tomorrow. Good job that we went out practicing, because we had a bit of a gear failure issue with Toms trapese harness breaking.

So all sorted with a good nights sleep ahead now and looking forward to getting into the racing tomorrow.