scott.projectsomewhere

There’s nothing worse than a 20+ hour flight across the planet…

Well nothing other than a 20+ hour flight and a 6 hour wait in the airport for John & Alex.

I’m so, so bored I have resorted to drinking English coffee… and it is appalling.

And all the while my boat sits idly in it’s box in Weymouth… waiting to be unpacked. At least I’ve had plenty of time to work out what to do for the next week.

So much for my in-depth analysis of the wind in Weymouth. It looks like the quip about the anemomenter being positioned behind a wall wasn’t far from the truth.

The wind over the last few days has been fresh, and it looks like it will stay that way for the next few days yet!

Now does that mean I can eat today or not?

John pointed me to this interesting, and ultimately rather depressing web site today. Weymouth Weather.

Now I don’t know where this weather station is, but hopefully their anemoneter is hidden behind a wall somewhere in the middle of town, cause the data aint good.

I ran some numbers through for July over the last 4 years for 10am, 12pm and 2pm. I plotted it all and drew some pretty graphs. But the graphs couldn’t hide the awful truth.

Percentage of days in a given range:
0 - 5 kn 39%
5 - 10 kn 37%
10 - 15 kn 16%
15 - 20 kn 8%
20 - 25 kn 0%
25+ kn 0%

Average wind for 12pm = 7.7 knots. Average gust = 15 knots.

So for our 5 days of racing we’d likely have 2 days of sub-5 lowriding, 2 days of 5-10 marginal foiling, and 1 day of moderate wind foiling. I’m excited!

…

But then you look at gust data and the story gets a bit more interesting… we actually get days with > 25 knots of wind.

Argh… it shows what happens when you don’t have a boat to tinker with!

All packed and ready to go.

Sunday’s Mothing ended up being a bit of a non-event, with my nice Zhik gear held up in Hong Kong, and little wind, rain and a lack of sleep all adding to not much really. My testing of new wand gear meant I bounced around with way too much lift, and with my carbon work - which would make Doink proud - pushed and nice amount of wash over the trailing foils. Beautiful.

Even less wind on Monday meant John, Ben and myself spent the day disassembling our boats and packing into the respective boxes with copious amounts of foam and bubble wrap.

I hope they make it all the way to WPNSA with no damage. The boats look a hell of a lot more confortable in their wooden crates than the soggy cardboard shitters we used last year. They should be fine.

Our little bulk airway bill contains 4 hulls, some 14 masts, 11 sails and plenty of other stuff. Except John’s main hydrofoil, which has found a new home on the bottom of the harbour… unfortunately he was still very fast with the banged-up substitute on Sunday. Anyway.

Now who’s boat can I borrow for the next couple of weekends…

After almost two weeks of 49er sailing in China, it’s time to head home. I’m actually looking forward to the prospect of stepping off the plane and going Moth sailing. A lot of displacement sailing in 4 knots probably does that to you. Or maybe I’m just a bit crazy. Or both.

We didn’t get onto the water on our last scheduled sailing day. There was less than 5 knots of breeze, and the tide was strengthening to 3 knots - running with the wind. It wasn’t going to be pretty. It seems strange to have to take into consideration the difference between wind over water and wind over ground, and make a decision to go or not to go based on that. Some 49ers tried, along with a bunch of other boats, but it didn’t exactly look worthwhile.

It’s been an interesting time here though. Nath & Ben have apparently made big gains by having us around, which sounds pretty ridiculous, but might just be right. In the last day of training races both boats were around the top mark in 1st and 2nd almost every time, even against some very very strong competition, and with some ordinary starting tactics. There’s got to be a few raised eyebrows when wood-ducks like Dave and myself do that repeatedly.

Anyways. It’s time to pack and head home.

I’ve been spreading the good word about Mothing, and have piqued the interest of a bunch of people, all of them good sailors. Being pros, none of them want to pony up the 20k+ AUD to get a new retail boat on the water, and none of them would accept any compromises, so getting them involved might be a bit of a challenge. But I’ll keep hassling after August all the same.

The good thing about seeing the attention to detail at this level is that now I’ve got a whole bunch of new ideas to go and test out… time to go and try a few.

The boats did arrive after all, and we’ve spent the last four or so days tuning and training against some of the best 49ers in the World…. though that’s not too difficult to find when you’re a tune-up boat for the World Champions.

This place continues to surprise me every day. A different set of weirdness to contend with each time we hit the water.

The first day for example, we launched into no wind and big chop, rebounding off the breakwall to provide that nice washing machine effect. After a tow out for a couple of kms, we found a 15+ knot on shore breeze, which within 50m or so, would go from a good 15, to zero as we sailed towards shore.

A couple of days later it was the opposite, with an offshore breeze blowing at 15 or so, then dying off to nothing about km offshore. Strange to blast downwind then suddenly have the spinnakers go limp with next to no visual queues.

Then yesterday we raced in so much sea-mist that we couldn’t see the marks on the course in only 5 knots of wind, even though the races were only 12 minutes long.

This is going to be one weird Olympic regatta come August.

But at least we’re not completely embarrassing ourselves - on the water - with a bunch of good finishes in the 10 or so boat fleet we raced in over the last few days. Even with the best of the Spanish, Danes, the Ukranians and the Germans, we’re holding our own. Helps to have very fast boats to use I guess.

Anyway, it’s been a beneficial week so far for Dave and I. We’ve learnt a fair amount and hopefully the guys have made some gains by having us here. And there’s still a bunch of days left.