Today is mine & Vera's last Saturday race for the season, as we will be in Broome, Western Australia next weekend, but hopefully with crew Swagman will be out next Saturday.
The has finally returned this week, and it looked like a good day for us. I initially decided upon using the No. 3 Blade Jib, but when the Start Line was set, and I looked at the wind direction, it looked as if it was going to be reach just off the wind, so we did a quick sail change upto the No. 1 Genoa just before the start. That was a good decision.
We started on the favoured pin end with a whole bunch of the BW8's, with Prim8's just in front of us who could have pushed outside the start line, but just let us in (Thank Tony Carter). The bigger sail, and sheets eased slightly gave us some good headway, with a loose cover over most of the fleet, and amongst the BW8's. We got to the 1st mark about 4th or 5th, and a beautiful spinnaker set kept our momentum.
We maintained our position most of the day, with a good loose tussle with Elusive (Richard Brisbane-Cohen), The Black Smoke (Kevin Schroeder), and one of the BW8's. We had one slow spinnaker drop, and one small twist that lost us a little bit of time, but we were able to pull that back.
It was pretty much a soldiers course with that wind direction, but one that we enjoyed, especially with more wind that we have had over the previous 2 weeks.
We were 6th across the line behind 5 BW8's, and 9th on handicap, with 22sec's covering 6th-10th. Prim8's and Pieces of 8, which are our main rivals for Consistency this season, finished 1st & 2nd, which has really hurt our chances. But, we are still in there for the hunt, and will hopefully get enough crew to get the boat out next weekend to keep us in the game, and then we will just have to see what happens.
Since we had the Backstay Adjuster failure a couple of weeks ago, the back-up system means that the rig is possibly a little looser than what it has been for a while, which obviously is good.
We will see how it goes into the new season at the end of the year, and decide what to do with it then.
In the meantime we have had the verbal go ahead from the insurance company (Club Marine) who are covering 80% of the cost for the replacement of the destroyed No. 1 spinnaker. So, I need to come up with about another $1000, but we have a bit of time, and I have a plan up my sleeve to get that together. I have done a design for the colours of the new spinnaker (see post later), which hopefully wont cost too much more, but the spinnaker panel design Dad & I will sit down and sort out when I return from Broome.
As this is mine & Vera's last competitive sail for the season, I thank all of the crew: Vera, Alysha, Brett, Simon T, Robin, Grant, as well as all of my fellow RPYC Division 2 competitors. It was a pretty enjoyable season even if we did miss some races due to damage and no wind. But, it was a good season, and we will see how the overall consistency places turn out at Prize Night on 20th May.
Vera, myself and the kids will hopefully be doing the RPYC Billy Can run to Rottnest Island in 2 weeks when we return from Broome. Hopefully we wont be too tired. This is just a social race to round out the end of the season.
Attached here is a picture of Simon T and Grant trimming the spinnaker on one of our downwind runs from Saturday. Looking up watch the set of the kite, and paying attention to detail - just the way I like it. There is Elusive behind us, riding our big stern wave, and a BW8 behind them.