crustysailor said..
still a good pic Shaggy.
something reminds me of Christmas..
Thanks Crusty. If you're inferring to color, my old school tie looked like that. I hated it, we were known as the walking barber poles!
Hort said..
G'day Shaggy, the saggy forestays giving the jib heaps of knuckle which isn't a bad thing for punching through a short chop. I recon it looks like a good set up for those conditions. If u needed to straighten up the forstay & reduce power I'd go one reef with max main sheet tension & hold onto the jib. It works for sports boats without back stays & it works for my boat (even though I've got a backstay).
Thanks very much Hort. I did have a reef, but I still had everything eased as it felt like too much power, so I might try the 2nd reef and get some sheet tension into it.
"Drive it like you stole it" ...it's the perfect description, don't ya reckon? Funny story, in the last B2G we'd just lost 30 mins jury-rigging the damaged boom, and we had mere minutes before the main fleet, that was previously comfortably over the horizon, were about to go storming past, all fully dialled up.
We're limping along at 6 knots, they're all doing high teens, so I had a rather unwanted great view at the time. Winds in the 20-30's, and all of these bright colored spinnakers over flecks of white appearing against a grey backdrop of leaden seas and sky. It was one of those moments, just an awesome sight, these tiny flecks of color all heeled mightily, struggling valiantly but seemingly dwarfed by the angry sea and big winds. I was watching this little Kerr getting closer and closer under full noise, you couldn't see the boat at all, only this glistening white foaming bow wave blasting along with an enormous dark blue kite wildly gyrating over it. They were flying, but the poor guys were just getting firehosed.
I'd just told the crew to baby the boat back in and semi-limp to the finish, but watching how hard the other boats were pushing re-motivated me, so I flipped and told the guys to start pushing harder.
Incremently please, a little bit harder at a time.
Ian joyfullys stick his head out the hatch and hollers to Mick on the helm "He said drive it like you stole it!"
Next minute we're pinned on the chine screaming along at 20 knots, the kite sheet easing sounding like a series of gunshots, I'm standing on the keel box watching the entire boat internals heave into the air over the waves and dump into the bilges, and and all I can hear from upstairs is hollering and yahooing.
You would be hard pressed to ever find a better descriptor for a helm command!
Marco Polo at Thomas Island, Whitsundays. A relatively quiet anchorage away from bareboats.
At Delcomyn Bay near Shoalwater Bay, Central Qld
Finally got to take the cliche pic this year. No prizes for guessing where.
cisco said..
