LimpetRacing.com

I know that it has been quite some time between postings here on LimpetRacing.  It is not from lack of amazing experiences I have had this summer.  I had a couple great cruising adventures with Limpet, and attended the San Juan Western Nationals in Coos Bay Oregon.  I will undoubtedly get together some belated posts on those outings in future weeks.  One of the major insights from my experience at Nationals is that I clearly suck as a sailboat racer.  My traditional back 1/3 finishes in Fleet #1 races translated into near dead last finishes with the increased competition of Nationals.  Luckily I went to Evergreen where I learned one of life’s most valuable lessons… “You can learn anything. . . if you know how to learn.”  The first step in learning you ask?  Get a good teacher. 

In my case I convinced Chris Popich the perennial fleet #1 race winner and San Juan 21 Western Vice Commodore that it would be in his best interest to let me crew with him during the fall race series.  I feed Chris a great line about increasing the competitiveness of the fleet… bla, bla, bla.  But my real objective is to abscond with the years of hard won San Juan 21 wisdom which Chris has laboriously gleaned from trial and error in countless races.  Yesterday we had fall race #2 at on Elliot bay, and it was my first chance to put operation “mind-suck” into action.

It started with setup of the boat.  Chris is very meticulous with his boat tuning.  He backs off his shrouds before dropping the mast, and then re-sets tension to be appropriate for the conditions before each race.  His base settings are 24 for upper shrouds and 29 for lower shrouds on a Loos gage.  Mast rake is also set for conditions with an adjustable forestay attachment point.  I need to get the measurements for this.  Chris also had raked spreaders (which is a difference from Limpet (see spreader post here).  Some other interesting setup items were that Chris uses very small gauge wire halyards connected to lines much smaller than the ones I use with Limpet.

Out on the water my first eye was to sail trim.  We were sailing in 5-10kts and the first thing I noticed was how loose Chris set everything.  Backstay was just barely snugged down which created quite a bit of head stay sag.  Jib halyard tension was also much looser than I had generally been setting things on Limpet.  Chris had a great way of describing how he sets jib tension.  His goal is to pull out the wrinkles but leave the jib loose enough that the sail fabric looks “soft.”  Main sail draft was pretty deep, with the clew 3-4 inches from the black band.  Cunningham was off, and the vang had slack pulled out, but no tension pulled on.  Jib cars were pulled back close to the back of their tracks (we measured after the race and had them set at 9 foot 7 1/5 inches back from the forstay tang).

When the jib was sheeted in hard and Chris was sailing to the telltales, the leading 10-20% of the main was fairly wrinkled and just beginning to luff.  Chris worked the traveler at every tack to keep the boom very close to centerline of the boat.  This generally had the traveler pulled 2-4 inches above centerline.  As the wind increased and puffs began to push us over optimal heel Chris played the backstay to keep the boat on her feet and powering forward.  Traditional wisdom of sail the boat flat was tossed out the window and when the breeze lightened we put weight down to keep our 5-10 degrease of heel.

All of these little details were great to see, but were basically things that I already knew to do.  The real sailing lesson was in the way Chris adjusted his strategy and tactics at each race.  In the first race we saw that the starboard pin and a port tack were going to be favored.  Chris put us right at the starboard end of the line and we immediately flopped over to port.  A couple boats followed but the rest of the fleet was fairly tightly bunched and held their starboard tack on a course well into shore.  We were feeling pretty good as we pulled away from the fleet.  Until we ran into the current created by the strongly flooding tide, at which point all the boats on the inside took over the race.  We rounded the windward mark in 4th place, and were unable to get back into the race, though we did make good gains by driving deeper into the bay and getting a push from the current which had hindered our progress to the windward mark. 

The next race Chris adjusted and while once again picking the starboard pin end.  Fausto got a great port tack start at the starboard pin and tacked to starboard with clean air and rights on the fleet when we got closer to shore.  We gained on Fausto but not enough to cross, and we threw in an extra tack to stay above him.  This allowed the fleet to bunch up on us.  As we approached the windward mark there was again crazy currents and waves.  Charmed Juan took an extra tack once clear of the point and seemed to significantly overstate the mark, but apparently this was the right thing to do as Stephen was able to crack off to a reach and come screaming into the mark blowing past everyone to take the lead.  Chris and I were leery of the marks reputation to demast San Juan 21s and gave it a wide berth.  Charmed Juan used our caution to slip inside and take the lead for good.  We also played with launching the spinnaker in front of the stays with very poor results, which added to Stephens lead.  We threw in some tacks at the end to try and make a move on Charmed Juan, but he matched us tack for tack, and we settled for second.

The final race we used all of the info we had gained over the prior two races and put Wooglin in just the right place for wind and water conditions.  We hugged the shoreline to windward, we overstated the mark and reached in on a port tack, we drove deep into the bay to pick up a push from the tide.  The result was a first place finish.

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