Spinnaker Sailing

I think we must have been a little reluctant to use the spinnaker after our near miss last week and our slight draining of confidence.That however changed in today's race..

Today's Wind (Race Start 9:30)

Xenon Spinnaker Sailing
After seeing the WODs and the Flying Fifteen putting up their spinnakers we realised that we probably should do the same. If only we had done sooner. The lesson learned today were

• provided you are on a near run, you should be ok
• you are going to get blown over if you treat your asymmetric spinnaker like a genoa. So that means when you do find yourself going over, you have got to turn down wind as soon as you can (I'm sure there is more theory to this and I'll look it up during the week.
• when you do go on the plane, the whole boat lifts out of the water and the tiller becomes very sensitive - it becomes easy to crash if you are not careful.

Sail Racing Lessons
I'm convinced somewhere there is a list of all the things that could possibly go wrong when you sail. As you learn to sail, you experience each one of these things on the list until you have crossed them all off and are a competent racer. Today we also learned to make sure we both know explicitly the race course and to continue to treat the mud banks with caution.

The above paragraph indicates where it went wrong today, we were running second behind the Flying Fifteen but hit the mud and let the WODs catch us, then after overtaking them we decided to go round an extra buoy (rats).