Category: Updates

Had a full crew a few weeks ago, so took advantage of the downtime to get some shots of the crew.

A brilliant showing for PERSPECTIVE this year:

Overall Fleet standings:

1. Perry-Eh
2. PERSPECTIVE
3. TARDIS
4. Battlewagon
5. Lindemere

Overall results (all boats combined)

1. Perry-Eh
2. Snaps II
3. PERSPECTIVE

Yup you read it correctly, second in our fleet, and third place overall!

(yes, that is a bit of scotch in the middle glass :-))

Funny story.  When the results for Day Five were announced, something wasn’t right.  We didn’t finish in the top three, despite such a great performance.  And we were announced as third in our fleet with eleven points, one behind Tardis.  It didn’t make sense, since that implied we had finished last today despite our great race, and we know we beat Battlewagon handily.  Afterwards, I discretely checked in with the organizers who double-checked the calculations.  Sure enough, there was a typo in the computation of the fleet results.  We were listed as taking 3 days, 8 hours and 44 minutes to complete the course, rather than the actual 3 hours and 44 minutes.  We made things whole by swapping the glasses, but I didn’t want to ask Tardis to switch flags with me.  Why take away their joy?  So just imagine the flag in this picture is red.  Or imagine it is for the overall position in the race. Or maybe we’ll get stitches to add a little detail so we remember.

Onward and upward, everyone!

Skootch, Stitches, Michelle and I represented PERSPECTIVE at Calvin & Renee’s engagement party today.  Lots of fun, including giant Jenga, water balloons filled with paint and an old Dutch game called Sjoelbak.  Skootch and I are still lousy at it.  Afterguy, we needed you!

Congratulations to the happy couple.  Tomorrow, we’ll know whether Renee can put up with Squirrel during a race (we already know Michelle can’t put up with me :-))

The Tuesday crew represented PERSPECTIVE at the Spring Awards evening, to collect two first place flags for the Spring Series.  (Never mind that only two boats qualified)  It was a special treat to have Paul Cavanaugh from Top Gun present the flags to us!

Well done lads, let’s got get ’em!

So, what’s the link between jib cars and iPads, you might be wondering?  Well, in the race tonight, half-way up the beat to the first mark, we were noticing that our “Performance” on iRegatta was showing us around 80% of the theoretical speed we should be achieving for the wind conditions.

Main trim looked good, so I checked out the jib trim.  It looked good, but Nonsuch said the bottom of the genoa looked pretty flat.  So, I pulled the jib car forward about an inch or two.  Bottom of the genoa was a little fuller.  Looked good.

Back to the iPad:  “Performance:  115%”.

And this adjustment got us ahead of Sandpiper at the windward mark!

As always, details matter, and now we have an objective reading to poke us when we are going too slow, AND to give us feedback on our adjustments.

Let’s never settle for 80% upwind.  We know we can get 100+.

Harry Potter came out of his home under the stairs and worked some magic on board PERSPECTIVE today!

Armed with a heap of experience, a volt-meter and a couple of zip-lock bags, David diagnosed our starting problem, and narrowed it down to one short piece of wire that was faulty.  Bi-passed, and abracadabra — she starts like a charm.

Next, we measured the water flow from the impeller to a bucket (at idle, and at 2000 RPM) and compared to the flow rate from the heat exchanger to a bucket — same results.  Aha, look upstream for problems, and presto magico — the O-ring for the strainer basket was lying behind the engine.  Cleaned, greased, installed and it was night and day — 4X the water flowing through the engine!

(Embarrasing, but simple!)

I went for a motor, half-way to the bridge at High RPM.  Tons of water flowing out, no steam and over six knots of boat speed.  We are ready for the lake now!

We’ve only had a few opportunities to fly the kite on really windy nights.  Each time it seems we learn something more.  I also talked to some of the other skippers last night after the race to pick up some more tips, so I thought I’d try to systematize what we have so far.  The risks seem to come in two forms: when sailing deep angles, we have to avoid death rolls; when sailing higher angles (like last night), we have to avoid broaching.

First a description of each:

• Death rolls are a lateral oscillation that starts up and grows.  The boat starts rocking back and forth, and gets difficult to steer and control.  If the rocking isn’t diminished it could lead to a broach.
• Broach is when the boat starts heading upwind with a mind of its own.  As it goes upwind, it gains more power, and like weather helm, it then continues to go higher. Meanwhile the boat begins to heel excessively and the rudder has absolutely no control over the steering.

Remedies

• Avoidance:  The best way to handle these circumstances is to avoid them.
  1. Anticipate the gusts — have someone spotting the wind and alerting everyone to a gust that might be on its way.  Calvin did a great job of that last night when we were able to ride a gust properly and set our speed record.
  2. Steer properly — steer to a lower heading just as the gust is beginning to build.  This way as the boat accelerates, the apparent wind angle doesn’t shift forward.  Done properly, the boat surges forward at great speed, but stays in balance.  This was the case when we set our speed record.
  3. Depower the sails — spinnaker pole low depowers the spinnaker, and easing the boom vang enables the mainsail to spill wind.  We probably could have done a bit more of these last night.
• Reaction: A quick reaction can sometimes reverse the trend  (Here’s a nice video of reacting to a broach)  It boils down to this sequence:
  1. Mainsail
     1. Ease boom vang (they call it a kicker in the video) — done early, it might be enough!.  Easing the boom vang allows the mainsail to spill wind which depowers the mainsail, and shifts the center of force forward, so that the rudder can start steering again, and a would-be broach turns into a surge of speed in the right direction.
     2. Ease the main sheet — done early, it might be enough!
  2. Spinnaker
     1. Ease the sheet — done early it might be enough!  A couple feet of line could do it, then when the boat is level again and steering is re-established, trim on and away we go.
     2. Blow the sheet!  Sometimes, that’s just what we’ll have to do.  We should NOT have stopper knots on our spinnaker sheets and guys.
• Recovery — if things have simply gone too far…
  • Blow the spinnaker guy and halyard.  The spinnaker will land in the water, but that’s okay so long as we have a stopper knot on our halyard we can retrieve it.  Yep, we’ve done that before!
  • Have a knife handy for a last resort.  Cut the halyard and let her go.  Better to lose a spinnaker than a boat.  I have a knife in the bag under the helm for just this kind of purpose.

And one nice piece of wisdom I found online:

May 31, 2018.  Flying Spinnaker in a 25 knot gust, AWA 120 degrees.

Yesterday’s race was a perfect chance to practice what I had learned in San Diego.  The weather was lovely, the wind was fairly steady, and the lads had everything else under control so I could just concentrate on the mainsail.

In a nutshell, the advice worked!

1. IGNORE THE LUFF.  I just focused on the trailing edge of the sail.  We had the outhaul on hard in only 10 knots of wind, and I used a bit of backstay.  There was still some back winding at the luff, and I just ignored it!
2. TOP BATTEN ANGLE.  I focused on this instead, and it was fascinating to feel the effect of sheet and traveler.  Once a tack was complete and we were powered up, I used the following approach
   1. Brought the traveler up so the boom was on centerline
   2. Used the course end of the main sheet to bring the top batten parallel to the boom.
   3. All the tell-tales were flying
   4. In these conditions, balance was good and Kiwi only had weather helm in the puffs
   5. Using the tweaker, I could make fine adjustments to the top batten angle that translated into a few degrees of pointing ability. This helped us climb up to Battlewagon’s line at a critical moment in last night’s race.
3. CONTRASTED to last year’s sail shape (where we chased away the backwinding by twisting the mainsail a lot), the sail was much less twisted, but it also wasn’t closing back on itself.  As a result, it felt like we were pointing nice and high.  When we tacked onto the lay line, and got up to speed, I could confidently offer Kiwi a bit more ‘height’ to make sure we made the mark.
4. BACKSTAY performed like it did in San Diego.  To achieve this, I’ve got the shrouds tensioned more than last year, especially the cap shrouds.  As a result, the forestay only tightens slightly when the backstay is applied.  Instead, the leach opens a bit.  In a way, the backstay and the tweaker had opposite effects:  the backstay opened the leach at the top of the sail, and the tweaker tightened the leach along its entire length.  Somehow these two interact to refine the shape of the trailing edge of the sail, a lot like how the halyard and Cunningham both affect the luff tension but at different heights.  I need to play with this more!
5. HALYARD and CUNNINGHAM.  Yeah, we still had this nice and snug.  Hard habit to break!

I also had a chance to think about TACKING.  The goal is to leave the tack with a fuller, more powerful sail shape while sailing a slightly lower angle until the boat gains speed.  This is especially critical in light wind, less so in moderate wind and beyond.

GOAL: to END the tack with the traveler a bit lower and the mainsheet a bit softer.

APPROACH:  just prior to the tack, draw up the traveler a few inches and ease the mainsheet a few inches — in other words, shift to a more twisted profile.

EFFECT: After tacking, this translates into a traveler that is low and a mainsheet that is loose.

POWERING UP:  First I raised the traveler gradually until the boom was on centerline.  Then, as the boat began to turn up, I trimmed on the main until the top batten was parallel to the boom.

Voila!

Work took me to San Diego today, so I grabbed the early, direct flight and wrangled my way into an afternoon racing lesson with J-world.  Mike from Cincinnati was getting a three-day private lesson, and let me share an afternoon.  Today, in 21C sunshine and 10-14 knots of wind, three of us sailed a J-80: Mike, me and our instructor.

The people were easy company, and I was on-board the boat within an hour of touchdown.  No motor, so we pulled the boat to the end of the finger dock, pointed into the wind, hoisted the main and sailed away, tacking every 20 meters.  Mike was at the helm, I was on the jib.  Piece of cake!

The J-80 is pretty similar to the J-100.  It’s 2 meters shorter, but about the same beam.  The first thing I noticed was that the mast had a lot of pre-bend.  This made me curious, since we are still learning about our tuning. I assumed this was because the shrouds were tight, but they weren’t. VERY CURIOUS.  The instructor thinks that their masts may have become permanently bent over time as people have left the backstays on overnight…and this might have been happening for 30 years.  Whatever the reason, this had a big impact on the mainsail shape, and the interplay of the other controls.  Simply put, the mainsail was quite shallow and flat.

Another difference was the traveler.  I like the traveler on the J-100 MUCH better.  With windward sheeting, we can play the traveler in gusts.  Not possible with the setup on the J-80.  This means the boom vang became important upwind, so that gusts could be managed with the sheet.  We should still try this, especially for windy races.

But the most important difference I noticed was that the boat only has one lifeline, rather than a pair – and good thing I noticed that!  Upwind I was hiking on the high side, and was about to slip my torso below the upper lifeline like we do on PERSPECTIVE. Just in time, I realized there wasn’t a lower line that would have been my ‘seatbelt’. YIKES!  We would have been practicing our man-over-board lessons out in a gentle 2 meter swell!!

We sailed white sail, with mainsail (no reef) and a #3 jib (no overlapping genoa).

Since I was just there for one afternoon, Mike let me hog the instructor’s attention, and I learned quite a lot.  My goal was to understand how to trim the mainsail for pointing and speed and what we should be doing about the backwinding we get in 10+ knots with the genoa.  I’ll try to summarize what I learned:

1. IGNORE THE LUFF.  It is the back edge of the mainsail that drives pointing and speed.  This is true even with a non-overlapping #3 jib.  It is even more the case when we have a #2 or #1 overlapping Genoa.  Bottom line: we can ignore the backwinding at the luff.
2. TOP BATTEN ANGLE.  The key parameter to optimize for pointing and speed is the angle between the boom and the top batten of the mainsail.  The target (in 10 knots or so of wind) is for that batten to be parallel to the boom.  To check this out, several times I lay down in the cockpit and looked up at the boom and the sail above it. With some coaching, I could see the angle.
   1. Boom Vang: On the J-80, we adjusted the boom vang to get the batten parallel to the boom.
   2. Traveler was mid-boat and sheet was on just hard enough to get the tell-tales streaming.
   3. Boom was a bit below center line
   4. Outhaul was almost maxed out (already at 10 knots)
   5. Luff of the mainsail (in 10 knots) was trembling.
3. So at 10 knots, the mainsail was very flat, and it was trembling along its luff.  Thinking about much mast bend was on the J-80, and the general flatness of the sail, it isn’t surprising that we get backwinded.  NOTE:  in higher winds (see below) and in lighter winds, more twist is desired, and the batten is deliberately angled away from the boom.
4. CONTRAST this to what we were doing last year.  We didn’t like the backwinding, and often put a lot of twist in the mainsail, with the traveler up to windward.  The boom was certainly around centerline, but the top batten would have had a 20 degree (or more) angle to the boom.  It looked good, and felt balanced, and we were fast, but we sacrificed pointing.
5. BACKSTAY should be playing a different role than we’ve been using it for.  I’ve been using the backstay aggressively when sailing upwind to flatten the main by bending the mast.  The downside of this is that it opens the leech of the mainsail, and the top batten is no longer parallel to the boom.  WE HAVE BEEN GIVING UP POINTING.  Sure, we could compensate by trimming the mainsheet harder (or the boom vang), but we haven’t!  The instructor used the backstay to manage weather helm by opening up the leech on purpose when we started to get overpowered.  Once the wind built to about 14 knots, we adjusted the backstay and I was lying again on the sole of the cockpit to watch the affect.  Sure enough, a bit of backstay added 5 degree increments to the angle between the batten and the boom.  The weather helm was better.  We did this before dropping the traveler.  HMMMM, maybe we need to be managing this actively upwind?
6. HALYARD & CUNNINGHAM.  I was surprised how little attention was played to the tension on the luff of the mainsail.  It goes back to point #1.  Take a look at the second picture. This shows how the halyard was set initially (LOOSE) in 10 knots downwind.  Okay, that’s cool.  But when we turned upwind, we just tweaked the Cunningham to clean up the lower part.  Later when we were sailing upwind in 14 knots, I asked again about the halyard and Cunningham, and the instructor said offhand,” yeah, I guess we could clean it up a bit. But that’s only a detail, focus first on getting the back edge of the sail right. In order of priority:
   1. Outhaul & Backstay
   2. Traveler & Sheet
   3. Halyard & Cunningham”
7. 
8. JIB.  In all of this, in order to point, it was critical to have the jib hauled in tight.  Since we had a #3, and not a genoa, I couldn’t learn how tight is the right tight for overlapping headsails.  But for the #3 jib, we brought it in tight.  The spreaders had black tape on them 2” and 4” from the tips.  To point high, we had the jib to the inner tape, jib lead car aft.  The last two inches made almost 10 degrees in pointing angle.  Hmmm, on windy nights with the #3 do we need to rig an INHAULER?

After this started to sink in, I came back to the fundamental difference in mast bend, and how we set up the boat last year (shortened forestay, no mast rake, controllable weather helm) vs the year previous (longer forestay, maximal mast rake, tons of weather helm). As a result of our discussion, this year I want to set up differently:  intermediate rake for an even tighter forestay with more pre-bend and flatter mainsail to manage weather helm without sacrificing pointing.

That just about sums it up.  I’ll follow up with J-world on the rig-tuning, but I think there is already plenty we can learn from in here!

Top Gun, here we come!