Ch Ch Changes

Sorry no report last night, I was shattered! With Sunday forecast for the Gorge to go nuclear, the RC crammed in 7 races, 3 in the morning session and 4 in the evening. Crawled out of the boat at about 7pm, pizza beer and bed. And yes Sunday was nuclear with no racing. Dalton sailed supremely to win, followed by Charlie, Matt, Zack, and Hans. Hans sailed very well in an old Bladerider, just shows what you can do with talent and skill!

For me, not the best regatta I have done, but a huge learning curve and experience. My usual consistency deserted me, probably through trying too much in such extreme conditions, and once gone it was hard to get it back. It's clear that when the breeze is 25 knots plus, it will punish the slightest mistake either in boat handling or in boat prep. Just getting to the start with 2 - 3 knots up hill current, readjusting to where to place, and just understand the signals, was tough, boy hard day at the office.

I had an awesome setup on the Raptor / Nano / EC6 combo, but trying to rig in the gusts of Saturday I snapped the forestay, then had to rush into trying to set up the wire shrouds whihc I had never done before. Too much rake made the boat really fast but almost unhandleable through the transitions. For the evening I put the MSL 13 back on as I knew the settings, but there's quite a bit of adjustment needed between the 2 rigs and I didn't quite get it right. So lessons learnt all around:

1. Gybing and tacking going great even in high winds
2. Make sure you know ALL settings if you use two rigs
3. Why splice when you can knot!

I'm going to re think a little and make sure I am keeping the boat very very simple and change only one thing at a time! Time to look at that list of 14 mods and start to reduce them. Eric made the job somewhat simpler, snapping my Nano 4. To be fair to him it was a really weird break, just snapped in half about 5 inches below the join. Looks like carbon hadn't been wetted out with enough epoxy. Calling CST...