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.