Anticipate the Shift!

Well after about a year and half of talking, negotiating and planning it is now official. I have signed my life away! I am now a proud member the Quantum Sail Design Team!

I will get more into this in the next few days but I just wanted to get this out there. For now my email address will remain the same and so do all my contact numbers.

This has been a long time coming and I am really excited about the new relationship. I look forward to representing Quantum Sails, they have a great product, great technology and they have a lot of serious plans to change the sailmaking world!

I want to thank Wally Cross and Farley Fontenot for working so hard to get this done. I also need to thank my parents and family for their understanding in this matter. While it is not a perfect family scenario they have supported me 100% in this new direction that I am heading.

As I mentioned more will follow with new email address and any other important information. Thanks again to all that made this happen and I look forward to this change.
Cheers

Tac Boston

Its been a while since I updated

As you can imagine this time of year is quite busy for us in the sailmaking industry! People wanted their sails that we built or serviced over the winter. Other people that have been driving around all winter with the torn sail in the truck, finally get off the sideline and bring it in. Oh yeah of course they bring it in the day before the boat launches :)

Here in Holland we have already sailed 3 Wednesday night races. I have had the please of sailing with Ted Etheridge on his Melges 32 Drumbeat. We have had a very good start to the season. The racing has been light, cold and very fun.

I am sure that we are giving our fellow races a bit of a hard time and I would expect soon to be hearing the rumblings of rating woes! We currently have a 2-1-1. The two first were by corrected times of 10 mins and 16 mins! The Melges loves light air and flat water and that is what we have had.

In the first race we sailed very well compiling a substantial lead at the first leeward mark, until a Mexican douse went pear shaped and we slided the Runner open quite bad, (see picture), then we find out that our VMG Asail is sitting on the dock! So we ended up having to sail the boat jib and main! Not fast at all I can tell you. So we just managed to hold off the Tripp 40 boat for boat and finished second to them corrected.

Needless to say the bow man got some good ribbing over the next week or so and we have yet to leave a sail on the dock!

I also traveled over to Detroit to do a day of coaching Mother's Day weekend. I was asked by Rod Spearin and his crew on Carerra his Beneteau 36.7. What a great day of sailing and we worked hard on training a couple new crew and a I put them through a ton of tacks and gybes and we got them sailing much better. Hopefully they will be ready to take on the Beneteau fleet for the Detroit NOOD.

I always enjoy sailing with new people and new teams. It gives me a chance to broaden my skills and develop better teaching tools. Each team is different and we need to come up with different solutions to the same issues. Quite fun really.

Coaching is one area that I do not think sailors use enough. For a small amount of money they can hire a good solid coach to help they get the boat up speed, shake off winter dust or help them further develop crew or even just get better at certain maneuvers.

Anyway, I just wanted to touch base real quick. We have a pile of regattas coming up. I am sailing the Detroit NOOD on Merlin the J-120. I just got signed on there. Then I am off to Cleveland for a J 22 regatta, Chicago NOOD on the NM 43 Tyrant, back to Chicago for Cleveland Race Week again on the 22. Then fingers crossed it is off to the Solent and the Swam 45 Worlds!

I will keep you posted. Also hoping that my buddy Paul gets us some more news on the Glory TP 52 Season.
Cheers
Tac

Palma Vela 2007

Med Cup 2007 – Glory’s tune-up at the Palma Vela Regatta, April 13 – April 23

With only two jumps to make it from Seattle to Palma, this trip was overseas was not so bad other than having to fly through London – always a torture test, it reinforces why everyone should take any opportunity they have to go through Amsterdam when possible. Arriving in Palma the boat team had done a great job and the boat was in near race ready trim (all TP52 were racing out of 2007 trim with non-validated certificates for Palma) allowing us to focus on getting the team up to speed. Although the boat was sea trialed in New Zealand by many of our key players, this was the first opportunity for our regular crew to really put the boat through its paces.

The Palma Vela event (http://www.palmavela.com) was a perfect opportunity for us to spend some time in the bay of Palma (2 of the 5 events are held here) before the MED CUP kicks off and for us to have extended time to tune and then race against several of the established teams and last year’s overall MED CUP winner Mean Machine. There were several similar J/V designs in the event including Anonimo, who we competed against in Sardinia and then both Christabella and Mean Machine who were very fast all last year. Glory, Anonimo and Mean Machine all came out of the same mold at Hakes Marine. By the end of the week we were very happy (by race 5) as it was quite frequently an all JV affair at the front of the fleet with our team consistently able to round marks with several of the top-flight teams.

Glory 2007

After much discussion, John chose to go with Rolf Vrolijk for the design for the new Glory – although the top 3 boats were all from different designers in 2006, overall as a team, we felt that the most top three results were coming from the J/V drawing-board given a near equal number of boats from the top designers. The change in design from the old Glory to the new 2007 design is leap of epic proportions – the overall feel, the way the boat jumps up surfs and the tremendous acceleration in the pre-starts and off the start line are all noticeable. Based on our early observations, we have built a stronger boat (structure-wise) for the Med conditions than many of our competitors that we have had the opportunity to look at last year but we will see if this is a handicap as the season goes on. It is forecasted that the events later in the series (Portugal and France) and then the 2007 Globals in Porto Cervo will be significantly windier than the first three events and the future sailing that John is looking to do in North America dictate that the boat have some real longevity and we have additional ring-frames for that bow that we can install when the boat comes to the US.

Additionally this year will also be a change for us as we move to a three spreader rig from Southern and North Sails provided by North NZ. As with many of the TP 52 campaigns we will be working with a sail designer who is doing work with an AC team and in combination with support from our local loft (Jack Christensen happened to be at the event in Palma) we have been quite happy to date with our technical support. We are very excited to be competing this year with what we consider to be a very competitive platform and it is up to each of us on the team to show up with the drive and attention to detail that rivals the pros we are racing against.

Observation 1 – No matter how much a custom boat costs, things will always break when you put a new boat through its paces – I learned this lesson many years ago and have always said “custom boats custom problems”. Well the first day of sailing was a good day with a firm 15 -20 knots of wind. Despite blowing a hydraulic fitting (supplier defect) in the first hour of sailing and the typical hydraulic oil mess below, we fixed it the best we could and continued to train. It was a good windy day to sort out the systems and other than the hydraulic head-stay issue and a set of cranky primary winch switches, we appeared to be in good shape.

On the second day of practice the gremlins took hold as we encountered multiple gear failures including magic wheel issues which damaged our jib adjustors and jib halyard lock issues which caused significant pain in our mark rounding operations (and caused multiple trips up the mast for our bow guy). These issues coupled with the increasing gear failures with our primary winches caused us quite a bit of work in the first few evenings as we continued to get Glory ready for its first race outing. Although using vacation time, participating in this event in reality turned into a 65 hour work week as we continued to push the boat’s new systems and attempted to make up a year of tuning to catch up to our race hardened competitors. In the end it was all worth it as we made significant gains day-to-day and moved up the leader-board on a per-race basis with scores of 9, 9, 5, 5, 5, 5, (overall we finished 7 of 9).

Observation 2 – Tweak, Tweak, Tweak – Last year’s winner Mean Machine showed up with significant changes this year, several of which we had identified with the designer and made to Glory while under construction. First was extending the deck at the transom to allow for a few additional inches of hiking platform while reaching and running. Second, was moving the mast back in the boat to improve the balance of the boat. The third change, which we did not do and are already looking at, is moving our tracks and enlarging the cutout in the cabin top to allow an even tighter sheeting angle. We sheeted well inside of 8-10 degrees all week and are looking for even tighter sheeting angles going forward in June. Finally, having now competed in one event in the 8-10 kt wind-range, the decision has been made to switch over from the wheels to a tiller for the remaining events in Spain. Seven of the nine new boats for 2007 are tiller driven and having sailed the Farr 40 with the tiller all winter we are confident that this is the right move.

Side Note: Links - A couple links to sites with updates on the upcoming med cup….

www.Medcup.org – Series Site

http://www.palmavela.es/ - Event site

www.buchanracing.com

Coming up later this week - recap of days one and two of competitive sailing at the Palma Vela.

Annapolis NOOD continued.

After flying home for a few days of work between our practice weekend and the regatta, we arrived to once again find very little wind. We arrived down at the boat around 8:30 AM and found the parking lot about empty? That kind of surprised us as we were anticipating the lot to be full of activity and we were hoping for some tuning partners.

We quickly launched anyway and left the dock to get some practice in, we still needed to work on tacking and dousing. We also wanted to look at the new mainsail that was just delivered. We again headed over towards the Navy's yacht yard and found two marks that we could sail between and started doing laps. Things were going very well and we had improved and things were looking good.

The morning breeze started to die after about an hour so we headed back to the dock and over to the Boat Yard again for lunch. After some good food we heading back to the dry sail lot and tried to find a dance partner for the afternoon. We finally got Curtis Florence and Suzie Wulff on the water to sail against us. As most know I have sailed more miles with Curtis then either of wish to admit, we have won many many races with each other. This is Curtis' first foray in boat ownership! C and S were quite smart in choosing Bill Abbott Jr. to drive Devil's Play for them.

So out we go and line up against another boat for the first time! We were quite happy as we had some great speed against them and pretty much controlled the tuning. It was nice to match up against them. Bill told us the boat looked great sailing the through the water and was very balanced looking. I have to agree, I really felt good about how we were going.

Devil's Play was having some winch issues, this was their first day on the water as well. C and S had bought this boat about 4 weeks before this event. So off to the dock and of course back to the Boat Yard!

Race Day #1, or should I say rain and no wind day #1! Nothing to report, other then the picture above.

Race Day #2, again the day arrived and the wind was nowhere to find. We sat out on the course for some time before the breeze finally came up and we were able to get some races off. In the first race, I had a shocker of a start, not a great first beat but on the run we were quite special. We passed about 7 boats on the run, by finding a bit of breeze down the middle and quite a good bit of pace. We continued to chip away at the fleet and ended the first race with a nice solid 6th place. (Of course out tuning partner ended up winning the race!)

Race 2 again saw a horrible start on my part, I was surprised how off my timing was on this boat. When I thought I was 1/2 lane off the line and the guy 1-1/5 boat lengths ahead was over, I was actually way late and he was perfect? So I need to work on this as well. We sailed OK this race, it was light and shifty and we missed a couple shifts up the first leg and again passed some boats downwind. We finished 16th. Not real bad but not where we felt we should have been.

Race 3, I do not remember! Must be the placing of 21 that causes temporary memory loss :)

We finished the day in 15th place about 7 points out of 11th. We were OK with that, we were knocking on the door of the top 10 and still had a day to go.

Sunday came with the breeze! What had been taking us an hour to sail to the course was taking like 15 mins, so we ended up out there really early. We took the sails down and just drifted around, watching the breeze and watching some of the boats that were sailing. We kind of formulated a plan and then after a hour of just watching we tuned the rig, raised the sails and went sailing.

The boat felt awesome! This was the first time we had sailed in any breeze at all and it was very very cool. We had some great wheels and make our race plan. Because I was starting so badly I decided to just play up near the boat so that I would have an escape if needed. Well I got a better start and was able to sail for a good hunk of time in clear air. We did want to get to the right so we tacked out and stuck to our plan. We sailed very well in this race and had great upwind speed, our downwind was not as good as we actually got passed by a couple boats. We were as high as 6th but finished with a 9th.

The last race of the regatta saw our best start. I could not believe the lane that I had! We were launched about mid way up the line and going very fast. Just about 2 mins after the start a big right shift came in and allowed Pete McChensey to leverage into a great spot on me and I could not live so we had to tack out. We sailed up the first 2/3 of the beat in the top 10 again. As we approached the top mark, we had three bad tacks in a row and got flushed out the back. This race was very disappointing as the wheels kind of came off. We lost a bunch of boats right at the finished and ended up with a 23rd.

That put us in 17th for the event, 4 points out of 13th. Not too bad, we accomplished our goal of a top half finished, but left us all disappointed because a much better result was easily achievable.

The team will get better and the results will improve. The most important thing was that Roger and Ned had a great weekend and had a ton of fun. Till next time

Tac

Preparation for the Annapolis NOOD

Ned Goodman, the happy owner!

So after several months of waiting and planning we finally arrived in Annapolis, the weekend before the event, to rig, practice and prepare for the NOOD regatta.

The boat was all that Scott said it would be! It has some cool little tricks that make sailing it easier and the bottom is just sweet. It really shows that the extra money up front gave us a much better boat then we were originally looking at.

As mentioned we flew in the weekend before the event to get the boat rigged, prep'ed and to sail it for the first time. This gave us a chance to apply a new type of "speed spooge" that I had not used yet. We applied the Holmenkol Sport Polish to clean the top sides and then applied the Aqua Speed process over that. It is very easy to apply the two coats needed and the result was quite impressive. (when we watched boats get pulled in front of us at the end of the regatta, they had a lot more cleaning to do then we did. All we needed to do was hose the boat off and it cleaned right up!)

Saturday brought light winds but just enough to go out and put a few laps around the fixed bouys. It was good to get the boat around the "race course" to see what we needed to do to improve. We broke the first session down during a great lunch at the Boat Yard and went back out to focus on those aspects that needed work. It was even lighter then in the morning so we only did a lap or two and then sailed in. What we learned we needed to work on was 1) tacking, I was doing a horrible job of getting the tacked. We needed Roger to hold the Jib back winded longer during the tack as well. This helps the boat roll and brings the bow down on the new board with less rudder movement from me. 2) Our douses needed serious work.

By the end of sailing on Saturday I was pretty convinced that I had never driven a boat before :) I was really surprised at how different the mechanics of tacking the 22 are compared to boats like the S2 7.9. For those who are not familar with the 22, the driver sits well forward of the traveler and all the controls are lead up to that position. So in a tack you need to roll the boat, work the traveler and of course get back behind the traveler, get to the new windward side and then move forward. It took me a while!

Sunday was again light and we worked very hard at getting the issues settled. We again found a couple marks that lined up and sailed a ton of ups and downs. We slowly started to get our douses figured and with each one they got better. The same was going for our tacks. I was still not doing them perfect but I was at least getting the hang of them. Roger sorting out the proper amount of back wind in the jib was a big key in that.

We started to notice that we were doing some things very well for a new team. Our sets were awesome. We quickly did a couple things that helps us with the sets. We put a mark on the spinnaker sheet at a point that if we cleat at that point on the beat, we can set the kite and the mark pre-sheets the sail in and allows the kite to fill.

Our grasp of where and when to sit in certain positions for boat feel and heel was quite good as well. We were starting to figure out how the boat liked to sailed, mind you that was with out even sailing against another boat! Our gybes we very good, I was convinced that Ned lied when he said he had never done bow before.

As Sunday ended and we needed to head to BWI for flights home, I was very happy with the base that we had laid down. I was confident that we would continue to improve tacking and dousing and we would be at least competent when the racing starting. Now who knew at this point whether we would be fast or not, that would have to wait till Thursday.

I will post more tomorrow on the actual regatta.
Cheers

Tac.