Bonxie - IRC win

A great race for FarrOut on friday night. The Bonxie trophy is WSC's annual night race to Arish Mell buoy and back. Not a bad turnout with 5 boats on the line at 2100, 3 of which were IRC rated.

The light wind off the line reinforced as the sun dropped and went forward making the Sponge Bob assymmetric spinnaker the right sail choice. By the turning mark we were thundering along at 9 knots boat speed, even overtaking Effusion the Elan 295. Alice's arms trimming the kite were dropping off.

The fetch back from the mark was quite good for us and we managed to hold Effusion underneath us for a long time before she overtook. Coming into the finish line was light and shifty tacks.

Well done everyone. First place IRC and 2nd in PY to Effusion.

Silly Achilles

That's the way

Oh how we smiled, we had dragged another into our web of ayso lunacy. Winter series race 3 was sailed in a dropping force 6 and once again we made a decent show of it. Stuart and Tracy had come back from Australia for a bit so Stuart was able to drive his own boat for a change.

The highlight for the race for me was overtaking the Achilles 9m "Rumrunner" flying the Touareg asymmetric and watching as they were scrabbling around on deck rigging a kite to hoist. We thought that Daddsie had been so upset by us zooming past that he was forcing a kite hoist in high winds at a shy angle. It was only as we went around the gybe mark, having dropped to white sail that we saw the full glory as they hoisted the Melges 24 spinnaker followed by shrieking as it filled and propelled them forward.

I look forward to more of those schenanigans. Daddsie told me later that they'd broken the spinnaker pole on their first hoist and had no choice other than to go for the ayso. Looked to me as though it fitted nicely although I think the drop was quite interesting without a proper tack line!

Melges 24 Spi on a Laser 28 / Autumn Long Distance.

The bank holiday monday finally gave us the opportunity to get down to the boat and mess around with bits of timber. We had been given an old Melges asymmetric at the start of the summer which is bigger than our current SB3 kite. A bit of pythagoras told us that we needed a bowsprit of around 1.25m to fly it.

I searched the yard and found an old bit of mahogany off the marina pontoons and Darren got to work with his saw and drill. We removed all of our constructions before the Autumn long distance race but had some time afterwards to play.

Can you hear banjos? The 1m long sprit

Flying like a dream!

This is the life

The inevitable.

 So the result was that the kite flew beautifully in the gentle 10 or so knots, we were really fast. We carried out a series of gybes which were really easy. The prod we made was actually 1m long but 1.25m would be better I think. Eventually it snapped.

Great stuff, but after the test we concluded the following:

• In a lot of breeze we wouldn't have enough keel or rudder to hold it.
• The permanent bowsprit would probably need to be about 75mm diameter to take the load.
• It would never be worth the rating hit.
• If you want to fly a big ayso. Sell the Laser and buy a J!

We handed the spinnaker on to Daddsie to try flying it on his boat. We'll stick with the Touareg.

Autumn Long Distance

We were late over the line for this race, mostly due to titting around with bits of wood. We selected right hand side of the beat which was the lifting tack. By the second mark we'd overtaken Rocket and were chasing Draig. A disastrous kite call from me saw us lose some ground, however at W mark at Hamm beach Darren pulled off a lovely bow launch whilst holding all the kite in his arms.

A shifty beat back over to B saw us do quite well, one big shift putting us right on the money. We didn't see any results, definately not a win but I'd hope we were up there.