Winter Series race 2 - a stable northerly?

A funny old wind for race 2 of the winter series at WSC, a strong northerly topping out at about 24 knots but without the real gusts and swings that you expect from that direction. FarrOut ended up with a 7th on corrected time, not a bad race, the course set was a "triangle sausage" meaning that we could use the asymmetric spinnaker on the first two spinnaker legs and the symmetric spinnaker on the deep leg. This last leg we sailed particularly well, sailing by the lee and keeping 7.5 - 8.3 knots downwind to cut the corner on some other boats only to lose some of the ground on the next beat.

The race was won by the X99 Excalibur, I wonder if they can straight bullet the series?

J'ai franchi la ligne!

Nearly There - Guadaloupe that is.

I can almost smell the Rhum blanc Agricole, and man you can smell that stuff from a distance. Been doing well recently in the Virtual Route du Rhum steering the Monococque FarrOutGBR814WeySC from a starting position of 37,000 odd to the 18,000s. Should finish this morning.

Winter Series Starts

Joel and the crew of excaliber showed us the way for the first race of the winter series at Weymouth Sailing Club. It was nice to see Richard's old boat doing so well, she always was a fast boat.

There wasn't a great deal of wind for the race and we didn't have a bad one on FarrOut, finishing sixth out of nine boats. The triangular course suited our choice of assymetric spinnaker even though it was quite deep to start off with. I thought Scoline did really well, they were off like a shot and up there with the faster boats.

Rainy and cold for the first of the winter series

Route du Rhum - Cammas Wins

There's so much going on in the Route du Rhum that it's hard to keep track. Franck Cammas has crossed in the fastest time on Groupama 3, followed in second by IDEC Francis Joyon, Thomas Coville on Sodebo is just on his way in now. In the IMOCA class my money is still on Armel Le Cleac'h.

Perhaps the most interesting is the class 40. It's worth having a read of Pete Goss' blog: http://www.petegoss.com/routedurhum/blog.php . He's really showing that he's still got it and it's great to see a Brit out there in the top flight even though by his own admission he doesn't know his boat as well as some of the other racers. Come on Pete!!!!

It's a long slog in the virtual race, I'm managing to stay ahead of Pete Jackson on Albran by taking a bit more southerly option but may run out of wind any day now!

End of Autumn Series - Race 6

FarrOut ended up tied with Scoline in fifth place for today's race. So there were more boats behind us on points than in front of us, and we beat a couple of boats over the water, we can be really happy about that! I think that we sailed a good race and were pretty fast, especially on the beat.

Good fun and all smiles. Congratulations to Joel and the crew of X99 Excalibur for the overall series win. And I think congratulations are also due to Weymouth Sailing Club where the IRC series has been well attended and given some excellent close racing. The results have shown how well IRC has worked in the mixed fleet.

Bring on the Winter Series.

http://www.weysailclub.org.uk/content/view/298/151/

Virtual Regatta - Route du Rhum

For some mad reason I signed up for the virtual Route du Rhum, however I haven't been paying much attention to my boat. I was abroad with work this week so didn't panic about changing course. I don't seem to be doing too badly though. I'm kind of demotivated as this is the first virtual regatta when I haven't been given the "pro" sails for free. In fact if you want sails and pilot and stuff like that you end up paying €20.
Not feeling flush I think we will just lazily steer the boat for free, it'll be a more chilled way of doing the race with no getting up in the night. Could the fact that I'm currently reading "The long way" by Bernard Moitessier be anything to do with my attitude?

At bl**dy Last!

Young Sam's bath-time sticky letters spell it out.....after so long with little success, the crew of FarrOut can celebrate a convincing win in the WSC sunday morning IRC series.

The race went well from the start with only ourselves and the Figaro 2 "Milan" seeing the pin bias on the line so that we could both bang a port tack flyer and cross in front of the fleet. Up a lumpy beat to M and we were third to the windward mark with only the Figaro and the Melges 24 in front of us. We held on and kept it safe, keeping her going the right way in big seas and deep runs.

Let's see more of it.

A Figaro 1 wins Solent Series!

http://www.yachtsandyachting.com/news/?article=154492

Well done to Black Diamond for doing so well in a Figaro. Hopefully this will encourage Richard and Simon who own Rattler. It's true that the IRC rating at 0.974 has been much better this year but I'd say that it's still a difficult boat to win in, and as us lot on Rattler managed to just pip Black Diamond in this year's Round the Island race I reckon it's about time they did some more round the cans racing (without nicking the FarrOut crew that is!).

Rattler in her Le Havre "Groupe Partouche" days.

Autumn Series Race 4

Hooray, we've got our boat speed back! This sunday's race was a cracker with a 10 boat IRC fleet. We only had four people on board but the boat was flying with her newly scrubbed bottom. The highlight was overtaking an X332 zooming along with the Tuareg ayso, unfortunately we found ourselves to leeward of Iduna and wasn't able to overtake because of their wind shadow and it took a while before we could make the move to go above her. It was quite breezy and if I headed up all I could see happening was accellerating and driving up their transom!

It all went wrong on the gybe as Dave was missing from the bow this week. Stephen's stirling effort couldn't save us from the wrap and we ended up losing a spinnaker sheet. The temporary replacement wasn't ready in time for the downwind part of the course so we goose-winged.

Top boat speed of the day 9.3 knots. Although we had a nightmare after the first reach, we did OK in the fleet and without the problems I'd like to think that we'd be up there. Roll on next week and great to see Darren back on the boat.

Filthy Bottom

I really hope that this is the reason that we've been doing so badly recently. That International VC Offshore really hasn't done the business for us in Weymouth harbour. I think that we'll try Nautix T speed next year.

We had sea squirts, worms, barnacles and everything on the bottom and to be honest the bottom is still horrible after we sprayed it all off. The worm casts had to be scraped off with a plastic scraper!

Route du Rhum 2010

I'm started to get excited about the Route du Rhum. Of course I'll support Safran in the Open 60s as ever but I have an idea that Armel Le Cleac'h (BritAir) can beat Mich Desj (Foncia), although the prof has got a new boat....it will be interesting to watch, I wouldn't bet any money on it though!

The Categorie Ultime multihulls are going to be amazing with these massive 100' + machines lined up against each other; Thomas Coville (Sodebo) vs. Frank Cammas (Groupama). 46 classe 40s....in fact 87 boats signed up at the moment.

Not long now.

http://www.routedurhum-labanquepostale.com/en/s01_home/s01p01_home.php

Autumn Race 3 - Max Points!

Another maximum point performance from FarrOut this sunday morning. We were doomed from the start being the slowest boat in the fleet and a forecast dying breeze. Sure enough the wind died off a lot but I think the filthy hull was a big problem to us. A lift out this friday should sort this out but I really haven't been happy with the performance of our anti-fouling this year.

All smiles on FarrOut though, as we used the tail end of the race to work on our boat speed and think that we have got an improvement there. There's nothing worse than working your butts off to go as fast as possible and then some flash git zooming past you, I stumbled on a YouTube video that indicates this quite well.....let's make sure we're the overtaker and not the overtaken. Enjoy.

Beneteau First 30, Juan K - Mich Desj

The FarrOut boys were disappointed by the new Beneteau First 30 when we had a poke around at the Southampton boat show. We were expecting to be entranced but instead were numbed by the poor level of finishing, it maybe that the test boats were rushed out to the boat shows but personally I'd have had someone fairing that keel bulb overnight seeing as though it was directly in the eyes of the public. Stepping from the First 30 onto a J97 turned frowns to smiles; a totter down the pontoon to an Archambault A31 and the smiles turned to leers.

The excellent Swedish blog Blur.se got to have a test sail on the First 30 and have published some polars and a test IRC cert. Worth having a look, click the translate button if your Swedish is rusty: http://www.blur.se/2010/10/12/first-30-polar-irc/#comments

Can we forgive the poor finish quality and stumpy looking mast if it goes like a train and wipes out bigger competition under IRC yet still satisfies the "sell it to the wife as a child friendly cruiser" test?

Still think Steve and Richard preferred the old salty cruiser boat at the boat show, they worry me......

Autumn Series Race 2

It was a very rusty and hung over FarrOut crew that made it out of Weymouth harbour on sunday morning. It was blowing quite hard from the east and our broken engine couldn't deliver us enough power meaning that we had to short tack out of the harbour causing a bit of drama first thing and a desperate scrabble to get the headsail up.

We went for a conservative sail plan of No. 4 headsail and full main, which maybe left us underpowered at times but not on our ears at others.....ho hum always a difficult choice. It was blowing at least 20 and with some seas that tended to keep our speed down to windward. With an excellent turnout in the IRC class (9 boats) and a poor turnout in PY, only 1 boat so Rumrunner opted to sail around behind us. We were deemed OCS and dipped back and then touched a mark so did a penalty turn, this as well as having a nasty kite wrap caused us to pick-up 9 points!

With lighter airs forecast next week we might do better.