Audi Invitational Recap!

Well here I sit in the Airport in Olbia awaiting my flight to Rome. The regatta is over and I again must leave one of the most beautiful places I have ever sailed. This is my second time here and I cannot wait to come back again next season!

The regatta is amazing! The organizers did a bang up job of putting together great racing, great parties and also great logisitics for this event. Audi as a sponsor stepped up and provided an opportunity to mix superstars that they sponsor with each team for the Coastal race on Saturday and the guest had a great time seeing what sailing was all about.

Our Rockstar was cross country skiing gold medalist Pietro Piller Cotter. Pietro helped the home county Italians win the 4 X 10 KM relay in the 2006 Winter games in Torino! Pietro is a great guy who had never sailed before but had some much fun that he came back with us on Saturday to finish the regatta! I do see a sailboat in his future!

Anyway back to the racing. As mentioned on Saturday we did a Coastal race. The race was only 16 miles for the Swans as the wind was quite light and we needed to finish in time for the Gala dinner at the YCPR. We had a great start, punched out at the pin end. Sailed out just short of lay line, tacked over to port and crossed the whole fleet! There really is not much like that first tack onto port and seeing the picture window below the boom, with you crossing the entire fleet!

We rounded the top about 4 boat lengths ahead of our "friends" on Atlantica. Well as they say, little details can derail a big effort and that is exactly what happened. We had a screw up in the set and that allowed three boats to catch up and roll over us, to the point where we had to gybe early in order to not get trained by the whole fleet.

Well going right downwind never work all week and this time was no different. This made of a long race in the mental up and down game. We finished 12th. It was really a huge blow to the team who had worked very hard at giving us in the back of the boat good crew work. The situation also was not helped by the fact that we were now sailing on a course that allowed for no new tactical opportunities to claw our way back to a more respectable finish.

Saturday was again welcomed with a sunny sky and light wind, in fact no wind at all. So we had a dock postponement for a couple hours. When we started to head to the racing area it looked real promising to get a good race off. Well the wind died forcing the RC to postpone again. About 15 minutes before the cut off time we got the last race off. One general recall later we were off.

Again Bill, Tea and Guinness had a great start down by the pin. We sailed very well, (again we now have speed!!!), up the first beat and rounded the top in 5th place. Johnny and I made a bad sail call for the run, choosing our A2 instead of the A1 and that cost us two places at that point. The second beat dealt really fluky conditions with boats just feet apart being in totally different wind strengths. This allowed a couple couple boats to get by and we rounded the last top mark in 9th place.

Bill and I saw a nice pressure lane off to left and decided to not do the standard gybe set like the rest of the fleet had done. We sailed lower and faster all way down the left side picking off one boat to finish the regatta with a very hard fought 8th place.

It is truly my opinion that our score card should have been all single digits for this event. We sailed better then it shows and we are getting our program together and we will continue to move up the leader board.

The next event is in Puerto Calebra in Lanzarote. It looks like it will be a great event and we will continue to work hard at getting better.

I will have a more technical debrief posted at some point this week. I am just burnt out right now and will have to way till I have my head sorted a little better!
Cheers

Tac

OUCH!

Well the day on water was a very eventful one. We have many goods things that happened and a couple of not so good things as well.

We are starting the boat very well again, the second start was a glamor! We have speed and angle which was missing in Cowes and we are looking better on the crew work side. However we managed to give away far too many boats with bad luck, bad tactics and a couple bad gybes.

In the first race we were solidly in the top six for the first 3/4 of the beat. We had great speed and Bill put us in really nice spots. Tea's driving is getting better by the leg and we were quite at ease with where we were. As we were approaching the far left side, Bill called for a tack as the other boat just to windward of us had motioned that they were going to tack. As we tacked they changed their mind and we did not have enough room to duck so we had to "panic" tack back. That caused us to lose a few precious boat lengths and set up for further disaster later.

We now are fully on port tack layline and as we came to the mark we did our tack inside two boat lengths and fouled another team. So we needed to do a 360 penalty turn. We ended up rounding the mark last! That is how close the racing is here. We did manage to pass a boat on the final run, we are really fast downwind the Quantum A2 is awesome!

For the second race we were all set up down near the pin end, allowed one boat to cross over us on port so that we kept our hole on the line. Just as we were starting to turn up after his stern we got hit from below by Atlantica and the hole you see above was created. Tea did a great job of regaining focus and just driving the boat. We again had speed and angle as good as anyone. We rounded the top in 6th place. We had another good run with lots of pace. We passed one boat and rounded the bottom mark in 5th place. This is where the race goes pear shaped.

The wind was starting to fight the gradient breeze versus the sea breeze and Bill thought that the sea breeze would win the battle so we headed off to the right. Well as it turns out it did not and we rounded the top mark the second time in 12th. We again sailed lower and faster then people on the runs. We made considerable time up on 4 boats, not quite enough against one, we finished overlapped, and did catch and pass another boat. So we ended up with a 11th.

Our standings do not show how well we are going through the water. What was once our problem is gone! We have speed and can hold a lane. Now we just need to the crew work down to no mistakes and get around the race a little better and we will start to see some solid results.

Once we hit the dock Bill and Guiness started to attack the hole in the side. We are lucky to have two boat builders on the team this week. I was supervisor/gopher for the product. We did miss the party but the boat is ready to sail today.

We have the coastal race today and some VIP on board for that. I heard it was a Olympic gold medalist in Cross Country skiing. More on that tomorrow.
Cheers

Tac

Practice Day

Good day again.

Well today we had a great practice late in the day as the Mistral slowly died away and we had a nice 18-22 knot day. We had two important goals today. 1) Choose which mainsail we would use and 2) do some spinnaker/crew practice. We were able to accomplish both tasks and are quite happy with the sail selection and we are a work in progress on the crew practice. But that is what you get for having a couple new players in key positions. Time as they say will conquer that.

We needed to decide whether we were to use the newly reshaped WB mainsail or the Quantum mainsail that we bought from Vixen. I can say that the WB mainsail is a much different sail then we last saw it. I am happy to report that the changes to the luff curve of the sail that I recommended were applied and the mainsail looks much better. This is for sure still set up more as a heavy air sail but the boat was able to finally sail to targets up wind.

Due to the weather forecast however we have chosen the Quantum Mainsail as it will give us more range for the conditions that we are expected to see for the remainder of the regatta. It is quite nice to finally have an option and finally have some pace with angle. Thing are looking better.

I am sitting at the yacht club getting ready for race day #1. The breeze is supposed to be about 9-14 going right all day. Beautiful sunny skies and warm temps!!!!!!!!! This is for sure not Cowes!

Here is a picture to prove it!
Cheers


Tac

Live from Porto Rotondo!

Well you all should like this blog much better then the Cowes blog! What can I say, the weather here is awesome! A little Mistral is in for the morning but that is supposed to diminish by afternoon. So we have a little time to check email and for me to write a short a note to you all.

The area here is gorgeous and the little sailing that we did was quite nice. The good news is that the new sails fit and looked like they should in conditions under range!

The boat was a bit of mess after the shipping and the delivery here, so we have been pushing through quite a work a list but that is almost finished as well. We will be going out today to finalize the sail wardrobe for the event and shaking down the crew work. We are all quite ready to hit the race track and get some serious racing in.

Here are a couple shots of the harbor.
Cheers

Tac