Final Sail

Been a bit busy lately! Had a few laps of the Prodrive test track in a Lamborghini Gallardo (wedding present c/o Mrs Cooke) last weekend. Also been working all hours getting a new Cherub mould done along with working through the list of Ninja orders - it's great to be so busy but just need to keep on top of things!

Had my final brief sail in Ninja Tuna on Wednesday. Tom was down to go through rigging and launching and the breeze filled in just enough to give me a 20 minute blast and time for him to get some foiling runs in. I'm pretty sure that will be my last sail till the week before the Nationals!
Great prep really - fingers crossed that all my efforts on the new boat show some reward... Luckily my boat handling wasn't too rusty and as long as I keep my fitness up between now and then (windsurfing in greece for a week should help!) I'm sure I will be OK.

I will apologise in advance to those who've gone to the effort of putting on the Poole and Scottish opens as I would normally have been at both and hate to be unsupportive of what circuit has been put on. Got to look at the bigger picture at the moment for once and spending time building rather than sailing has to be done...

Ninja Tuna Sold!

Edit - SOLD!

Tom Offer, a Musto Skiff sailor from Chew Valley has bought her and will hopefully be joining the Bristol Moth Squadron...


Bearing in mind how little sailing I'm doing at the moment and the fact that I'm building a new boat for the Europeans I've decided to put Ninja Tuna up for sale now...

GBR3618, Ninja Tuna
Built oct 2009, 31KG all up
Harken hardware
2010 Hyde sail, used once
HM Skinny Aardvark mast (353 equivalent) and boom
High modulus rear wing bars (very stiff boat)
Aero profiled compression bars
Ride height bias adjuster
Continuous control lines
Launching trolley
Foil bags
Top cover

Tuned up open meeting winner, ready to win. Can be repainted for £250 if you dont like pink...

£8000  mike '@' aardvarkracing.co.uk

Team Ninja rule the inlands!

Well done to Top Ninja Jason Belben for winning the inlands this weekend beating Adam May and Ricky Tagg in their M2's along with Ninja Olivier Vidal in 4th. I couldn't make the event this year for various reasons but it was good to see just over 20 boats (6 Ninjas!) made the effort despite a miserable forecast.

I've barely been doing any sailing lately and am unlikely to be doing much for the next month or so as I've got quite a few projects on the go at the moment. Concentrating on the technical bits for now and hopefully leaving enough time to get up to speed - just have to rely on mountain biking to keep my fitness up!

Will keep posting here, so long as the rest of the Bristol crew keep me updated!

Sunday Sailing

We had 4 boats out at the club yesterday enjoying a patchy 4-10 knot breeze.

Darren was out in his Prowler for the second time and while the lighter patches were hard going he's getting the boat going and will be flying fine in no time while Leo was out in the Pimp Ninja making the most of some new setup mods and is flying much earlier and more consistently.

Alan was going great in his Yellow boat and has made some massive improvements in his tacking and is very regularly foiling out the other side. Gibing is still entertaining however! Alan did the second and third races and was pulling out a good lead in the last one when the breeze was at it's most consistent.

I managed the first and second races. The first was heavy on lowriding with a couple of bursts of foiling meaning I just managed to beat the ent's on the water while the second saw a bit more foiling action but managed to keep in the puffs and shifts to keep up with the lead boat (300) while lowriding. I finished a good lap up in the end but don't think it will have been enough!

The crazy sail has some new battens in now, which seems to have fixed a couple of issues, but made another one worse! The sail doesn't gibe itself and you now have to hit it really hard to get the battens across in light airs meaning a mid-gibe-whack technique is called for. It is now flying closer to its design shape and we've got a pretty good idea where to go with the MK2 though however. It's been quite an interesting experience trying to get Kevin's theory to merge with the practical reality of sailmaking. It's great that we have Mike Lennon and the Hyde team on board to try and coax the ideas into reality...

While the breeze hasn't really been playing ball lately I've been getting out and doing some Mountain Biking with Emma. We've got a great playground around here in the mendips and I feel it's doing some good to my fitness - at least this year I might be able to persuade myself into a reasonable shape before the end of the season. Maybe one year I might be able to do that and get some practice in too!

Bristol Moth open

Photos c/o Angela Cooke

The first International Moth open of 2010 took place on Saturday at Bristol Corinthian yacht club. With a dire forecast for no wind and a few boats still astray after the recent Worlds in Dubai, 10 of the most persistent Mothies took to the skies in a very patchy marginal foiling breeze including three attending their very first Moth event.

Race one took part in the most constant breeze of the day and started off with a tussel between Martin Fear and Chris Bishop in their Bladeriders and Mike Cooke in his Ninja with current national champion Cooke coming out on top making the most of the lighter patches to pull away.

Race two was a brief one lapper as the breeze was veering wildly. Cooke managed to throw away a hundred yard lead on the run watching Bishop sail around the edge of the lake in breeze and foil through the line. Robin Wood took third after a close battle with Gareth Davies.

The final race of the day saw a patchy couple of laps as the last of the breeze faded. Cooke drifted across the line to take the win, closely followed by Alan Watson in his Ninja with Bishop in third.

Overall results:

1st, 3618, Mike Cooke, Ninja, BCYC
2nd,  3511, Chris Bishop, Bladerider, BCYC
3rd, TBA, Alan Watson, Ninja, BCYC
4th, 3330, Robin Wood, Bladerider, British Steel
5th, 3323, Martin Fear, Bladerider, BCYC
6th, 3253, Gareth Davies, Bladerider, Stone SC
7th, 4085, Simon Hindley, Prowler, BCYC
8th, 3371, Leo Carswell, Axiom v1, BCYC
9th, TBA, Thomas Lambert, Ninja, Wilsonian SC
10th, 3495, Jon Peats, Bladerider, Queen Mary

Bristol open this weekend

The first open of the season is this coming weekend at Bristol Corinthian YC. The event is set to be a 3 race series run on the Saturday 10th April starting at 11.30.
Now, I had planned on running a spectator friendly slalom event on the Sunday fitting around the club racing so as not to get in the way but it hasn't panned out particularly well. If anyone would like to stick around and sail on the Sunday in the club racing and do some tuning they will be most welcome and I will find us somewhere to go for grub on the Saturday night. This is a bit frustrating for me as we did something very similar two years ago with great feedback from those at the club about how good it was to watch.
The postcode for finding the club is BS26 2DL. It is pretty well signposted once you get near.
For accommodation, Axebridge is the closest village and Cheddar another good option.

Cheers, hope to see you all there.

Mike Cooke
GBR3618 Ninja Tuna

Queen Mary Coaching Weekend

We had a unprecedented turnout of 16 boats at QMSC over the weekend with plenty of new faces turning out to polish their skills and several people stepping foot in Moths for the first time!

While I will admit that my organisation left a little to be desired, I'm pretty sure everyone left the weekend with some new tricks to ponder over. We have a ton load of footage of people which I am currently sifting through at the moment and getting up onto Youtube. While it won't win any awards for cinematography it does at least allow people to go back over it and see what they were doing.

So thanks to Alex Adams and Doug Pybus for helping out on the water with Phillipe and Helen covering the video on Saturday. James Roche and Ben Sutcliffe helped out with on the water footage on Sunday and some yelling of times for our mini racing sessions...

I had a great weekend and I hope everyone else did too! Heres the first video, I'm afraid it's me as it was the easiest one to pick out of the clips with that sail...

Sunday sailing

While another world championships was being wrapped up (well done Si), Leo and myself were out enjoying the sunshine and the first double figure (air, but certainly not water!) temperatures of the year with a bit of a sail down at Axebridge.

I did the first race of the day in the blustery 15-20knots which was all over the place at times - it's very difficult trying to test out gear when the wind is like this as the combination of vicious gusts and big shifts mean you can't settle down and get a handle on things. I'm still pretty happy with how the crazy sail is behaving and have a couple of things in mind to improve a couple of its foibles. I'm very keen to sail with it against some fast boats and see how it stacks up as I have effectively been sailing in isolation all winter....

Leo had a wild ride and has posted his first 20 club speed, jumping on the ladder at 21.7 knots! I got very excited by my 25.9 before I spotted the units were in mph - I wondered why my takeoff speeds were a bit high...
Leo wasn't the only new 20+knotter over the weekend, with Jo Evans pushing her Ninja into the 20 knot club down at Stokes Bay which is quite an achievement given the Solent chop!

More sailing this sunday, hopefully team Wales will be joining us, along with a new Mothy in the shape of Darren Mcnamara who was bought Alan's Prowler.

Get pumped

Sitting on the sidelines yet again watching another worlds go by is leaving me frustrated. I'm not much of a hindsight person tending to just get on with things and take it on board but this past week has been one of regret! Having spent the winter sailing in light airs alone Dubai looks like it would have been a great Ninja venue. I kinda knew this already but couldn't get excited enough by the venue to get my act together.

The pumping thing has come to the fore again, mostly thanks to Cleans commentary. I feel that if we de-restrict pumping in order to get foiling we are going to have another windsurfing style problem where suddenly you have a fleet of gulls flapping their wings to get started rather than using the finesse that rules currently. The raceboards had a situation when pumping was allowed and suddenly the fitness levels had to increase massively to cope with the increased workload and I feel that will be bad for the class - putting top level competition out of the reach of a 9-5er and favouring those who can go to the gym/sailing all the time.
Being allowed to pump won't mean the heavier guys get more of a level playing field, as the lighter guys will just foil earlier anwyay.
I may be biased as I'm currently not too bad at it, but I find marginal conditions incredibly testing and rewarding - sure you get the frustration as guys foil past you but the challenge of getting going, looking well up the course keeping in the breeze and picking your spot to gybe involves just as much finesse and technique as sheeting on and pelting downhill at 25 knots. As always, sailing is a sport of averages, every dog has his day and those that deal best with whats thrown at them tend to come out on top and if you spend your whole time practicing in 10+ knots you should wholely expect to get your ass handed to you in 5.

Anyway, well done to Amac, a triumph (so far) of brains over brawn. Also well done to Mike Lennon who regularly gets overlooked and is right up there, thanks to a winter of hard work (Aardvark spars help obviously!).

Rant over. Normal service to be resumed...

Sunday sailing

Got out for a brief sail today and was joined by Martin and Robin Wood who was over from Wales for a bit of company. There wasn't much wind but I managed the first race pretty well, despite lowriding for most of the first lap. The wind started dying off over lunch so we all headed in. Martin however decided not to de-rig and went back out an hour later in a nice 10-15 knot breeze - Typical!
Martin has a new North V8 and CST mast to mess around with which are a huge leap on from the X8 rig he's been using up till now. He's looking pretty tidy now and is close to nailing some foiling tacks but still has a huge ventilation problem in the cold water. Robin has a new Ninja rudder fitted to the back of his X8 which seems to have cured it - He's now foiling much higher with no sign of the dreaded vent and the smaller rudder T doesn't seem to have affected his take off which was my main concern with the experiment. Will be interesting to see how he gets on with it in a bit more breeze.

Ninja Tuna is now back home for a bit of a tidy up before going to the dinghy show next weekend so no sailing for me then - come by the Moth stand and say hi as I will be there both days...

PS - Good luck to everyone out in Dubai - I shall be watching enviously yet again and if anyone suggests a worlds within 6 months of the next one at the AGM, please shoot them.