Wednesday 5 October 2011

Port Talbot regatta

Richie Westbury and I joined DJ over at Port Talbot for the Tata Steel regatta on Saturday. We were blessed with 25+ degrees sunshine and 8-10 knots of breeze and had a all round ace time.

Richie now has his Bladerider pretty well pimped now with an Aardvark rudder and new high modulus daggerboard vertical and the results have been pretty impressive with the boat now foiling high and level and I was actually pleasantly surprised with it after a brief boat swap towards the end of the day. I think a new Ninja might have found it's way onto his christmas list though!

We did a couple of short course races with lots of laps and a good chance to sort out my awful tacking from Paignton. Finally getting my mojo back and nailing most of them. Hit some pretty good speeds over the course of the day putting in a 24.5 knot best in one of the bigger puffs.

Nick Dallimore took a load of photos which he's kindly letting me put up here... I never get over seeing my old boats sailing around. Must crack on with my new paintjob...







Tuesday 4 October 2011

Post Paignton


Sorry for the lack of blogging lately. The run up to Paignton was pretty manic getting Shredder vaguely sailable and after catching up with work a potential house move is interfering with the important task of Moth blogging.

Paignton was a success for me as far as I'm concerned! I managed to get the setup pretty much bang on for the first sail and in a marginal first race came in second. The breeze picked up a bit for the rest of the weekend and I proved incapable of tacking but started getting back on it by the final race to grab third overall from Andrew Friend who is really starting to get rapid in the Dazzle Moth.

I was especially pleased with the light airs stuff on Saturday as I was running a variant of the Skinny Ninja foils with 10% (hell, it worked for Rohan so why not eh?) off the span of both foils. I was still foiling about as early as Chris who has a bit of weight on me, but still earlier than the other boats I was around. There maybe a bit of potential for more to come off yet in my pursuit of that elusive 30 knots although I don't want to end up with a one trick pony thats only any good in 10 knots plus!

Paignton was probably the nicest weekends sailing I've had this year with good breezes and good competition. More of that please!
 
The Bristol crew are starting to get active again. Badger has a new high modulus daggerboard vertical in his Bladerider after an unfortunate incident with a faulty spare foil and a lack of manufacturer to send it back to! Darren had a prodder malfunction on his Prowler while Leo is threatening to get the saw out on Wasabi the Pimp Ninja. Hopefully Tom will be joining us again this winter too with potential for DJ and Richie Westbury to be sailing at Cheddar too - should be great to get some momentum going...

Stay tuned!