scott.projectsomewhere

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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under 49er, Moth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.