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
