Saturday, September 14, 2013

Don't Ever do that to me Again!

I think Skipper got his daggerboard from here

Skipper decided to do something nice for me, but like a typical man, he fouled up on the execution.  He is getting my daggerboard patched up, and he was supposed to bring his spare to use for racing today. He couldn't find it, so he had to borrow one.  Not a good move.  He managed to get one that was home made, maybe even for another class boat, and was way too fat to fit in my daggerboard trunk. Only about two feet of it was actually in the water, and it stuck up so far in the air that he had trouble tacking.

We did really well downwind, but every upwind leg was an exercise in frustration. We would point about 5 degrees better than the other boats, but we would slide so far sideways that they would open up huge leads on us. By the last race we figured out that heeling way over to windward would let my chine help out the daggerboard a bit, but it was too little too late.

I wish that I could say that we didn't make any mistakes.  Well I didn't anyway.  Skipper made two huge mistakes on port/starboard crossings, one that cost us second and pushed us into last because two boats passed us while we were doing turns. Another time we were first at the mark, but we had to duck a starboard boat, and ended up being the last around the mark, because we kept sliding sideways into it.

Since Skipper made a couple of bonehead tactical mistakes, and we lost every race on the upwind legs, I know what USA 17 feels like racing in the America's Cup. Can I change my tactician?

2 comments:

  1. Nice blog and I like hearing thing's from your perspective Sunfish 3929.

    Hang in there. I'm sure Skipper will take this day as a learning experience and quickly learn to do better by you.

    my2fish sent me. glad he did.

    Cheers.

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  2. Thank you. Skipper is a slow learner, but eventually he catches on.

    ReplyDelete