May 02 2016

Next Pico race, de-brief of this weekend

Published by at 00:31 under Cadets,Monohulls

Dear Cadets and Parents,

Next Pico race 8th of May, Sunday, start at 13:20
Proposed meeting time is 12:00 in the dinghy park.
Similar structure, as previously.
Demonstration of close hauled sailing by the jib on the grass, if enough wind.
Demonstration of lying to (standing still).
Otherwise dry practice.
I am thinking about a trapezoid course (modified triangular course).
If the weather is trying, we may stick to our gate course.

De-brief this weekend:

De-brief Pico Race 30/04/2016 at 17:20 Saturday

4 boats came to take up the challenge of racing in rather chilly conditions. We had offshore wind, coming from about north-west. It was tricky with gusts and lulls and biggish shifts. We set up a course with two gates, one near the distance mark, the other close to the shore, a bit east of the slipway.

The idea was to have a course running between the two gates close hauled one way and broad reach the other way. After the previous course (running beam reach both ways) I felt it was time to introduce some complexity. I wanted to take a further step towards the proper upwind sailing, which will be really exciting once we get there. Due to the wind shifting however, our course got closer to beam reach again. Nevertheless the complexity was there with the gusts, lulls and shifts.

Start line was the first gate closer to shore. The first start was recalled, as all boats did a really early start. Our competitors were approaching the start line with care, and were nicely close. What let all down was a strong gust, which pushed everybody through the line. Not an easy situation. There was some confusion after, as I did not explain about a possible recall when briefing. During the debrief we discussed that controlled slow approach, stopping and waiting are actually an important skills, and we should cover this in a later training session.

The re-start was a lot better and there was tight racing. Sadly there was confusion about the gate, and every competitor did get the gate wrong at times, some lots of times. It is simple, really, a gate is like a door, if you enter a house, you do not avoid the door, but go through straight.

We managed to start the second race soon after the first one. Some of the gust have been really trying, racing got a bit more difficult, with the sailors getting more and more cold. The competition was tight, the fleet stayed well together. After the finish we had all enough, the sun disappeared and the wind gradually died off.

After packing the boats away, showering and changing we had a short debriefing with prize giving. Points discussed: starting techniques, speed and upright sailing (balance).

One of our experienced cadets kindly took a younger girl sailor with him, and went on to win both races. I hope he set an example with this which many will follow.

De-brief Pico Race 01/05/2016 at 18:20 Sunday

We had wonderful sunshine, which faded later on.
We started with a short land drill: tiller extension, mainsheet, tacking were discussed and practiced. Double handed sheeting in. A Pico hull was put onto the grass at the car park with the rudder on.

A good steady onshore breeze developed. The difficulty was that the breeze got a bit too lively and good size waves were rolling. We decided to take the course a little bit more offshore than usual, near mark 3. Windward gate was nice and narrow and the start line was not too long either. We made a short course. The idea was to have close hauled one way and beam reach the way back, but at times the setup was nearly a beat upwind.

We had two races, about 10 minutes each. We had 9 boats on the water to start with.

I am a bit uncertain about the final positions of the first race, I have to admit, I was struggling to follow the boats in this short course. I hope I got the first three positions right, with regards of further positions – I am lost.

The second race got easier to record as a few sailors retired.

Great day with good sailing. Thanks very much for the parent’s support and for Toby’s help with Polly. Toby and Sarah are always there for me to help running the race, keep me in good spirit. Thank you.

See you on the water next Sunday:

Andras

Andras Gal
Pico Class Captain

No responses yet

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.