What a beautiful day to go sailing! Sunny skies and a light breeze made for a most enjoyable afternoon for the West Harbour Winter Series. After the last scheduled race two weeks ago was abandoned for lack of wind the starter took the precaution to set the short courses so we had just over 100 minutes on the course.
We lined up for a start at the boat end and a long way back so when a big header came we had to tack back to preserve our position. Then the breeze died and left us a minute short of the line. At least we were free to tack at the line and make up half of our deficit by the first mark. Most of the legs of the course were tight reaches or hard on the wind but we set the big yellow spinnaker on the two short square legs and held out the genoa on another short square leg.
On the first tight reach we caught lot of yachts whose skippers were trying to fly spinnakers while we chose to two sail reach. This was the pattern for the rest of the race so that by the finish we had moved up to second fastest but a long way behind the MD 35. Our eighth place on handicap out of a fleet or 15 finishers was encouraging and we were not last on ORC scoring.
There is room for improvement. The one minute lost at the start could be avoided and we can be faster with the spinnaker hoists. One drop we left until we had gybed and that made it harder to control and pull down the sock. A Quick drop on the square run would have saved a few more seconds. Potentially there was one place we could have saved on ORC and two places on PHS.
There was a few short windward works and the angles on two of these were something spectacular so perhaps there is also ground to lose a few places.
Some very good tacking angles on two of the short windward works