A lot has happened in these past few days including completing the water system, installing the last bits of the spinnaker handling gear, fitting the galley drawers and touching up the white primer of galley tops and engine compartment. There are still a few items held in place with tape ready for gluing or for catches to be fitted but in general most of the comfort items of the yacht are finished. Today more milestones were achieved with filling the water tanks for the first time, doing some serious windward sailing on the harbour in 17 knots of breeze, setting the symmetric spinnaker and finally scoring a handicap place at the Greenwich Flying Squadron last twilight of the year. Also the AIS transmission from Passion X has been picked up by the land station at South Head and our position recorded on Marine Traffic. While not as good as the tracks on the chart plotter it was amusing to see our windward tacking angles on Marine Traffic.
The windward working was just a means of getting upwind so that we could run back with the spinnaker but by good fortune many of our Winter Wednesday competitors were out on the harbour racing so we sailed on the same line to see how we performed. As we were intent of keeping clear is was not a good indication of relative performance but we did seem to be going faster and higher and it won’t be long before we join them in serious racing.
The masthead symmetric spinnaker off Passion is quite a good fractional kite on Passion X and could be even taller. A masthead spinnaker will have to be about 2 metres longer on the luff.
Back at Greenwich we put on the No 1 genoa in preparation for the last Twilight race of the season. Just as racing started the breeze faded making it very hard for yacht to get up to the start line. We hovered around the line and managed to start on time with Meridian below and Lisdillon in between. Meridian powered away to an early impressive lead while we struggled to keep in front of Lisdillon all the way to the west end of Cockatoo Island. The crew on Passion X ggave the usual warnings to the attacking yacht not to go inside on the continuous obstruction and we gave up some more ground on Meridian by going so high into the wind shadow to prevent Lisdillon passing us to windward. Once around the island we sailed faster and higher steadily drawing away.
Off Long Nose the breeze died and for a few moments we thought we might get close to Meridian but they got into the new breeze better than we did and drew further ahead. Lisdillon made a good attempt to cross us on port but we experienced a late lift and they tacked away. Luckily for us they tacked away from the approaching breeze and we regained our margin.
The balance of the black fleet seemed to be becalmed and the blue fleet that starts 5 minutes behind was just coming out of Humbug as we were working back from rounding Cockatoo Island. The tide was helping on the run home so the distance from the fleet that was still beating into the tide just got longer and longer so we managed a third place on handicap behind Meridian and Lisdillon.
For a change we were one of the first yachts home but the deck was already packed for our last BBQ of the season. The weather was perfect for the last night and we think that 340 sailors and supporters attended and made for a great finale to the twilight season. A big thank you to our Twilight organizers, Andrew Limmer, Glenda Cameron – Strange, the starter crew and the fantastic crew from Foodz. As a twilight race and BBQ it was “As good as it gets.”
The semi completed galley with drawers fitted
The symmetric masthead spinnaker on Passion becomes a fractional kite on Passion X