scott.projectsomewhere

Bora brought up an interesting interpretation of the situation at the bottom mark which was perfectly captured by the guys from sailcam.tv.

Either pure blond came in late and did not deserve room or Kinder Caring(sp?) did not give quite enough room. The wind coming off the fairy looks like it lifts kinder caring and heads you and pure blond making it tougher for that boat to give room.

Better watch it a 3rd time I think mate.

From the first two photos, Pure Blonde looks pretty much clear ahead. Definitely not late to get an overlap. They round clean (fairly) and avoid the carnage. Hard to pin blame on them.

The next couple of photos show all the boats fairly clearly overlapped. 7 and Rag on starboard, Kinder and Southern Cross on port.

Now 7 needs to be given room to round the mark, as they have bouy room. We are giving it to them up until the point where we’re hit by Kinder and spin down into 7.

It’s pretty obvious to me that the boats on port had to give way to the starboard boats which were also entitled to bouy room. Kinder should’ve gybed to give us that room but didn’t. Now Kinder could argue that having Southern Cross on port below them stopped them from gybing.

I have heard that Southern Cross weren’t able to gybe because of the ferry to leeward, but from the photos, it’s pretty clear the ferry is well away from the bottom mark, with plenty of opportunity to execute a gybe.

So who will get thrown out? What do you think?

The protest will be held on Sunday morning prior to the race. 7 is protesting Rag, Rag is protesting Kinder, Kinder is protesting Southern Cross, and Southern Cross is protesting 7.

Going to be interesting…

Sunday’s 18 race was shaping up to be a glamour, with a great breeze and some awesome downwind rides.

Unfortunately it didn’t last too long for us.

We were smoking into the first bottom mark in a bunch of boats just behind the two leaders, when it all came apart. Coming in above the lay, we gybe dropped onto starboard with Seve on the inside doing the same. Van Munster was doing a windward drop and coming in on port, with Euan doing the same on his outside hip.

So getting 4 18s, or 56 feet of beam, around the bottom mark at the same time is never easy. When it’s windy it’s harder, and with 2 port tackers not game to gybe out of the way, and a nice Captain Cook cruiser looking very out of place to leeward it was all going to go pear shaped.

And it did.

We were almost going to make it, til Van Munsters pole ran into us and spun us down into Seve, who gybed around the mark and took our port side wing wire with him. They ripped the pole out of our boat, then spun into a 180 and capsized, taking gauges out of our hull while Munster was having a go at our rudder. We stayed upright and limped around fixing the remains of the pole and the wires from damaging the hull, while Munster and Seve sat upside down with various bits of damage.

I think they got it all on film too. It will be good to see how that looks on SailCam.tv tomorrow.

Woody sailed away with the win. 7, Rag, Van Munster, and Smeg all filed protests for both our bottom mark incident, and the one after it when AppliancesOnline mounted Smeg at full speed and wiped out their crew and their outer wing bar.

We weren’t so pissed about the damage, especially given that the boatbuilder caused it, but we were about missing the rides downhill. Bugger.

It was great to see a fleet of 17 Moths sail in the Balmoral Interclub on Saturday. Last week’s blog posts seemed to have pushed the right buttons and there were plenty of internet bragging points at stake, so there was also plenty of enthusiasm to race.

Despite all that enthusiam, we ended up with a patchy SE breeze, which at Balmoral is never pretty. We waited around for a long time while the antiques roadshow got underway, and when we finally started the breeze was fading further.

I started well at the pin and quickly tacked and crossed the fleet, but fell off the foils a couple of boatlengths from the top mark and had Luka and Andrew sail through the inside. Andrew turned around after we lifted off down the reach and made a nice quip about being “the fastest Moths in Sydney”.

In the end that comment was about as mis-timed as the one on shore which went something like “the days of the lightweight Moth sailor have ended”. I passed Andrew soon after the wing mark, then gained on Luka by the bottom, only to sail a dumb second work on the wrong side of the course and give away plenty of distance on the lead, seeing Dave cross ahead on the second last tack.

I still rounded in second, and with Dave capsizing on the bottom reach I had enough of a buffer to start slowly reeling in the lead.

With such a patchy breeze the opportunities didn’t take long to open up, and I passed Luka on the next work, then foiled first down the next run to build up a safe lead. It was then time to start working on lapping Les, something he’d asked me not to do before we started.

The last lap was when those end-of-days lightweights showed their last gasp of life, with sub 60kg Matt coming from behind Luka and Dave to foil early and sail away for 2nd place over the line.

So a 1-2 finish for the rich, famous, light and lucky of Woollahra.

The next Interclub is at St George the weekend before SIRS, with extra bonus bragging points at stake.

–

Sledging and the weekend’s results aside, Phil is on the money with his analysis of the fastest Moths in Sydney. I reckon Dave and Luka are obviously very quick, and I am never really able to match them in straight line speed. The conditions for the Nationals at Geelong, with relatively flat water and consistent breeze are going to allow that speed to show through, moreso than the shite that Balmoral or the Harbour throws up week in week out. It’s going to be an interesting week.

–

The sail home against a ripping tide in a dying breeze was long, but by the time we got back to Rose Bay, Ben still had the energy for a boat swap. We were still trying to find out what’s not quite right with the setup of his new Bladerider, but it was pretty obvious that there’s a few easy things we can do right away to make it work better. Easy things like replacing the semi-elastic supplied hiking straps with the soon-to-be-released Zhik Moth Hiking straps, and putting on one of our gucci vang systems so it can actually be pulled on. Plenty more to do for sure, but there’s always a bunch of simple and relatively cheap things to do that make them work better.

Oh the World is so unfair!

I’ve heard variations on the theme for a while now, from the guys who don’t put in any effort and complain about being beaten by Channel 7 in the 18s, or from the various postings on the mothosphere about professionalism, sponsorship, regatta attendance et al.

So I think it’s time to propose a new trophy. Something that everyone can expect to achieve after taking into account the various challenges that life throws up.

Perhaps a “People’s Foiler” trophy.

It would involve some simple adjustments to finish time to scale everyone.

Something like:

Correct time = finish time * ( (1/height (cm)/weight (kg)) / age of boat (years) * average weekly hours spent sailing * ((number of children) / total age of children (years)) * (annual income / mortgage amount * (2 iff non-home owning dirty tenant scum)) * ((number of employees|1 if employed) + (7 iff government job)) * (hours work each week) * (number of wives + ex-wives | other) / (size of trust fund) * (((1 iff union member) + 0.5 if labor voter)|0.75) * (average number of setup issues) / amount of sponsorship * (% body fat content) / average hours spent in the gym per week / (1/number of blog entries * blog comments * anonymous blog comments) * (total hours worked on boat / amount spent on professionally built components) / size of workshop space * number of club fleets setup * ((number of association|committee positions held) * (2 iff International | 1.5 iff National | 1.25 iff State | 1.1 iff Club | 0.75 iff imaginary) / number of sponsor stickers carried * average bags of (chips eaten|beers consumed) per week / net worth of (parents|inheritance) * (average wind speed / body weight) / ((number of sails + number of masts + number of foils) /10) * (number of posts on sailinganarchy + boatdesign.net + moth.asn.au/forum) * (2 iff had to walk 10 miles to school barefoot) * (100 / age (years)) / (number of ‘team’ memberships / team level (A=10|B=5|C=0.5) * (number of innovative design concepts named after you + number of patents held) / (number of boats owned in the past) / years sailed * number of other boats sailed / (number of races won * major championships won whereby major is self-defined) / (4-minute ERG score (m) * (finish heart-rate - resting heart rate) / average number of hours sleep / (years spent sailing * (1 | 10 * years spent in SMOD class) / (years spent at University / (5 iff Aero Engineering | 0.5 iff boat building apprenticeship | 0.75 iff sailmaking apprenticeship)) / number of olympic campaigns * (10 / (1 + number of times bait has been swallowed on obvious wind-up internet posts))

Should be fairly simple to implement don’t you think? Have I missed some other important quality?

At least that way we can all sail fairly and have 1 true winner.

What do you think?

With summer approaching I had the chance to head out for my first twilight training session in the Moth yesterday. After about 45 minutes of drills I lined up against the old 90′ Shockwave/Rambler/Whatever that was doing the CYC twilight race, and using the same mark I was rounding.

And while speed comparisons are always lame, it was fun to just blast away from them upwind even though they were pointing 15 degrees higher. I waited for them at their top mark, then pulled away and left them behind on the downwind. Sure they’ll have a higher top speed when they actually get the thing wound up, but in 12 knots and only a foot of chop my little boat is more than competitive.

Nice.

For the Moths at SIRS this year.

In terms of numbers, we’re still only at 6 7 13 17, but early entries don’t close til the 26th. Even at those numbers we still put our poor Olympic cousins to shame.

Despite an effective boycott from our mates at St George, the class is going to field a strong fleet. We should have good competition throughout the performance range, with the current World Champion, the current US National Champion, the odd Olympic medallist and a bunch of local, interstate and overseas boats committing to it. It’s a shame some, even apparently the fastest Moth in Sydney, are missing the opportunity to finally put to bed the belief that Moths don’t have a strong racing fleet.

Oh well.

I’m looking forward to having the Moths dominate the sailing press with some awesome photographs of the fleet with Sydney as the backdrop. Front page of thedailysail.com anyone?