Light duties are driving me nuts since I would rather be out on the water testing sail settings on Passion X than sitting at home writing blogs. I am also mortified that my gentle observation on my face book page that we need to do better to sail to our difficult ORCi and ICR ratings was cheekily construed by a “friend” as wielding the cat o nine tails whip. The crew has already rejected T shirts bearing the observation “The beatings shall continue until morale improves” so perhaps I am just digging a deeper hole by raising the topic. Despite my disbelief at the level of our ratings in both forms of the game (ORCi and IRC) I do believe we are not sailing the yacht to its potential. The crew have observed some very good performance and we would like to emulate them more often. Some recent very good photos of Passion X on a twilight evening at Greenwich Flying Squadron gives a basis for comparison with the really top gun boats in the 40 ft size range. Tongue in cheek, but perhaps more seriously than that, I have found a few photos for comparison. Apart from the rather obvious large numbers of crew leaning hard from the rail of Invictus there are some sail setting observations worth considering. These Fast 40+ yachts have wider spreaders and despite that their sails when beating in heavy air are well wide of the spreaders and their booms are dropped to leeward. This is something we need to experiment with and find how to have such a free leech with out it flogging in the wind or hooking with a tight leech line.
Passion X current windward sail settings. This was in a light patch of an other wise average 13 knot evening.
Invictus at a similar angle to Passion X in the first photo with some minor changes to crew positions
Girls on Film on starboard crossing Invictus on a hard windward beat. Note the jib twist and boom down.