scott.projectsomewhere

My last blog title might have been too prescient.

Today I went for a couple of risks. I’d switched to a straight wand to test yesterday, but given I had to repair the forestay fitting I didn’t get a chance to test it. So I went all out and ran with the M351 mast and low gearing on the wand.

The gearing didn’t work so well, but when I wound it out it all went fine.

Fine is one way to put it.

I blasted out of the blocks, and was just destroying people for pace upwind. I took a few shifts and led around the top mark by a good margin. The soft mast was so easy when the breeze was up.

I stuffed the laylines at the bottom and had to double gybe, before doing a lame rounding. Bora was eating up the distance. A couple of lame tacks upwind and he almost crossed, before I got my shit together and opened up another nice margin by the top of the course.

I held him off downwind to score a close win. Nice to have one of those on the scorecard.

But then it all goes pear shaped.

I was sitting in the boat slowly heading upwind, and when I pulled away to go back to the startline, I pitchpoled, and in the pitchpole the front wing bar and compression strut tore in half. I heard the crack when I hit the water, and knew it was going to be nasty. In the process the mast foot blew out of the base of the mast, and then the top of the boom got crushed as it flailed around underwater.

So from 1st, to nothing.

There was no chance of getting it sorted for the 3rd race, so I had to cop 2 more DNSs, along with the one from the first day. There goes my regatta.

I’m now in 9th spot. Game over.

I have managed to find parts from the spare Mach2, so the boat is back in action for tomorrow. Fingers crossed nothing else blows up.

Now I’m down to only 1 mast, and John’s boom I brought as a spare. 5 races lost in the 2 events is a bit much, and along with the work done in Sydney makes the whole experience a bit more than character building.

As John often says, it’s a c%^t of a sport at times.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 9:26 am and is filed under Moth, Sailing. 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.