Viper Sailing at Charleston Race Week!

Good day All!

I am just back from Charleston Race Week, where I sat in a RIB each day, watching, coaching and rescuing flip flops, hats and missed beer cans. It is always an interesting time when you are at a regatta and not sailing. Can’t say that I totally enjoy it but you always learn a lot by watching how others are doing things.

I was there supporting Brad and his Viper 640 team of Lee Shuckerow and Eric Vigrass. This is the second event that we at Doyle Boston Sailmakers have done in the Viper fleet and it certainly will not be the last. If you remember I sailed the St. Pete NOOD regatta on the Viper.

For this event we brought a new set of sails, version 2.0 if you will, that we finished just minutes before jumping in the van and heading south. The new sails are a tweak from the sails that I used in St. Pete, we felt that we were close to what we wanted but we knew we had lots of room for tweaking and that is what we did. The new sails are very nice and people on the race course really noticed that Brad was there. The boys ended up 3^rd in the event, not to bad considering the boat they used is anywhere from 75-100 pounds heavier then the rest of them!

Anyway, I wanted to talk more about my observations from the ‘Coach boat’ then how the sails looked or how the team sailed. One thing that the Viper class does that I really like is the top to bottom flow of information between the best of the fleet to the new comers and folks back in the pack a ways. One of the reasons that I went down in the RIB was to help the fleet out with observations and give folks that were struggling some help to improve their position in the fleet and that in turn increases their FUN factor.

The fleet is very open to help and is often rather spongy in wanting more help and more info on how to get better and get up the fleet farther. The Viper fleet, lead by Class President Justin Scott try very hard to have a debrief at the end of the day where the top boats from the day talk about how they were set up, how they sailed the day and what they might have learned. All of this to immediately helps the fleet get better and have closer sailing. I truly wish that more fleets did this!

For this event we only were able to hold one such debrief, on Saturday night, but the information shared was helpful for the fleet and I noticed that many of the things that we talked that night suddenly appeared on more and more boats. This shows that these folks want to learn and want to get better. For the debrief Ethan Bixby and Ched Proctor from North Sails and myself answered many questions and gave tips of what we saw, how they sailed that day from Ethan and Ched’s perspective as they sailed. It is always interesting to see how other teams come to the same solution using a different path.

Some of the things that I noticed from the Coach Boat are as follows.

1) Not trimming the jib hard enough.

Many of top crew have the sail geometry/dynamics set up so that when they are fully sheeting in going upwind in most breeze the clew of the jib is either two blocked or very close.

2) Having the jib tack way up in the air

Setting up with the tack to high in the air changes a couple of important things. 1) It changes the whole geometry of the jib, sheeting and set up. 2) It opens the end plate effect up. You will find that if your tack is up much more then 2” you will be quickly running out of jib track and you will not be able to slide the lead back to open the leech and “out haul” the foot.

3) Not having the main halyard hoisted all the way

Again this changes the sheeting geometry of the sail. It makes your leech appear longer, which with the bridle will not allow you to trim your mainsheet hard enough. It also means that you will end up with big wrinkles in the luff of your sail as the Cunningham will bottom out.

4) Forgetting to pull the outhaul back on before heading upwind

In the big breeze on Friday and Sunday, I noticed many times that as boats rounded the leeward with their outhaul eased way out, they would not hold the lane with the boat that had the proper set up. The boat with the eased outhaul was always over powered, heeled too much and going a bit sideways. All bad when trying to hold that lane either in front or behind the boat around you.

5) Not sailing with enough Vang/GNAV in heavy air upwind.

What happens here is that when you ease the mainsheet in the big puffs your boom raises and actually powers the sail more! Not at all what you want when you are already over powered.

6) Not playing the jib sheet enough in big puffs

With most sport boats, you will find that as soon as the breeze is enough to start washing out/flogging the mainsail you need to start to ease the jib sheet as well. Otherwise the boat loses balance and the jib starts to pull the bow down away from the breeze. The good guys are adjusting the jib with each puff to keep the bow moving forward.

7) Sailing with the rig too loose in big breeze

Again this allows the sails to power back up and makes the boat heel more and go sideways.

8) Great big giant smiles on faces going downwind in 20 knots of breeze!

Only cure for this is to go back to sailing lead mines!

I would like to end this little blog session thanking the Viper fleet for welcoming us into the class with open arms, say thank you to the Charleston Circle 1 Race Committee for running an excellent regatta and thanking you all for paying to attention to this blog.

Cheers
Tac

Busy Times

Good day all

Well it is a lovely day here in Chicago, for February that is :) I just got back to town after being over in Sarnia for a few days. While there I worked with Brad on a Rig Tune and Sail trim seminar that we jointly gave at South Port Sailing Club in Windsor on Wednesday night.

The talk went very well, all seemed to enjoy it and there was talk from a couple other local clubs about having do one for them. So we shall see. While neither of us are super comfortable doing them I think together we did a pretty good job. Brad is certainly getting more at least and much better at doing them.

I am going to have the loft get it up on the doyleboston.com website in the very near future for all of you to see if you wish. It covers pretty basic concepts on rig tune and sail shape to a bit more techie for those of you that are as well. I hope that you enjoy it and please feel free to contact either Brad or Myself to further discuss it.

On another, while I was in Sarnia I got a phone from John Baxter asking to be the jib trimmer on board Anema and Core the TP 52 from Annapolis. I will be joing the team on Wednesday for the Miami Race Week regatta. I am really looking forward to sailing on this boat, it is one of the old Platoon's from Germany. These boats are the top end of the sport right now and getting the opportunity to sail on one is really quite exciting!

I will try to keep you all posted and give you a bit of an insiders view of these awesome boats.

Anyway that is all that I know for now!

The above picture is the boat is Anema and Core at Key West. (I "borrowed" the picture from Tim Wilkes, thanks Tim)

Viper sailing!

Good Morning all

Well I am back in Chicago after a great time sailing the Viper 640 at the St. Pete NOOD regatta. I wanted to take a few minutes this morning to talk about the Viper and the fleet.

I need to start by thanking a few people for making this happen. Harvey Barnes for allowing me to sail his boat, Mom and Dad for towing the thing down to St. Pete and my Bro for helping get it all sorted, rigged and sailing. Oh yeah and I guess I need to thank DC and Scott for sailing with me and having a great time while doing it. It was great to have part of the band back together.

Set Up.

What an easy to set up, launch and tune. This boat takes very little time to get the rig up and get your ass wet and sailing! Every thing makes sense, remember we had not really set one up before. We got the rig tuned, the boat wet and off for the first sail in very little time at all. Now that we know what we are doing it will be that much simpler in the future.

Sailing

This boat sails very nicely and is quite fast in the light air flat water that we had in St. Pete, but beware! This boat will be very wet in the breeze and bump! Yeah, back to dinghy days :) The boat has a very nice feel upwind, just a slight tug on the tiller when the boat is in the groove. Downwind in the light if you sail too flat you get a pretty wicked lee helm but that is sorted out as soon as you put about 5 degrees of heel in the boat, (either windward or leeward).

One thing that is a bit tricky to get used to is tacking and gybing. As you start to tack or gybe the bridal in the back of the bus inhibits how far you can turn the tiller, so it tacks more like an Etchells then a normal sport boat. So you have to be pretty agressive on the kinetics and time the last hard push or pull to flick the bow through and onto the next tack.

The Fleet

What a great group of people! I have known Brian Bennett, the man behind the Viper, for over 10 years and he has always been a great dude and worked very hard to make the Viper a great little boat. So it was no real surprise that a fleet that Brian is involved with would also be very warm and inviting to new sailors. I found that the class did their turns when they needed to, no real screaming and shouting at each other. Heck, there was even a couple very attractive "sailor chicks" in the fleet! That always makes a class better in my opinion :)

The racing was tight, too tight on the first beat for me, I had a duck turn into a goose! I just misjudged the duck and hit the very last possible spot you can hit on the stern of the a Viper. Sorry Harvey and Jonathon! Check is in the mail :)

The Races

I must say that I was very disapointed in the RC for this event. While I thought they did a great job of keeping us on the dock until the wind filled in. BUT, we always sailed an course that finished us upwind. This wastes so much time on the water. We are here to race so why not race us. Finishing upwind means that we averaged about 60 mins between our finish time and our start time. With the size of this boat that should almost be enough time to get two more races off!

I just don't understand why we did this. Maybe one of you will be able to fill me in on this but it just does not make sense.


Final thoughts.

I look forward to sailing the Viper more and in fact have at least one customer that is really keen on the boat and I am hoping to be introducing the Viper to another potential client if we can find one to Charter for Charleston. That event has over 35 entries at this point! Can't wait to sail in that fleet.

If I can't find a boat for my client I will join my Brad and sail with him for that event.

I wish that I had a picture or two of us sailing but they have not posted any yet so I will just add a random shot of a cool boat :)
Cheers for now.

Tac