Today was an important day; my beloved 13941 was back on the water.
I was really impressed by the work that Ben Dingwall had done with the repair to the bow, and looking forward to sailing her again.
It took most of the morning to get everything set up. I did not check the mast rake or other mast settings, but I know the rig tension was correct.
Weather was very very mild this weekend - about 1 or 2 knots, and coming from different directions every time - typical Welsh Harp, in fact.
Sarah & I sailed out together, seeing this as primarily a "shake down" cruise, rather than real racing.
The challenge I find in light wind courses is the need to keep focused and concentrate on the very minute wind changes all the time. For the first race, I accidentally balked Lydia (14038), and had to apologise later. She was very gracious about it. We started near the top of the fleet during the first beat, but went too wide, lost concentration, and ended up half way down. From then on, things got worse. At one time, we were at the back of the fleet. But coming up to the penultimate buoy, it seemed to me that there was a chance to sail "loose" for the committee boat, rather than the finish buoy. It worked, and we took a couple of boats before the finish.
For Sarah's race, she also made a reasonable start, but it is not easy sailing in light winds, particularly if you do not have much experience of roll tacking. So she lost a lot of places, but we were again able to sneak in a couple of gains on the final leg.
The last race was an unfortunate mixture of things done correctly and things done very badly. I think we ended up last overall.
However, it was an enjoyable day.
The only problem was when we took the boat off the water. I estimate that we had had a couple of gallons of water (10 litres?) pour out of the bung between the two "skins". What had it come from? I have no idea.
I noticed that the starboard self-bailer had filled with water, so clearly there is a leak somewhere there. And it is possible that we had shipped water through the centreboard casing when we roll tacked the boat.
So we have some investigation to do.
Next Stop: the Brent Regatta during the Bank Holiday Monday. Looking forward to it.
