Ghostly gray. Yes, that may be our mood. However, no, it was the dominant color of sky and sea at the last appointment of our Tuesday club racing serie 2020. Season’s over.
Muffled sounds. Slippery deck. No visibility whatsoever. An eerie closure to a serie marked by windless evenings and Covid-19 adapted club racing at Nordön, KMS sailing club.
Veloce is no light air rocket and therefore we are very pleased to have had good results anyway, more importantly, consistent ones.
Our positions in the spring serie were 2-3-2-8-4-6 and in the autumn serie 4-3-1-2-3.
From the 4th race on the spring serie, somebody turned off the wind and we suffered from our “jib-only” inventory. We introduced an old genoa 130% after a painful Bohusracet during summer and the result was immediate. I suppose this confirms that at least one new entry in our sail inventory is due… more to follow.
We had an opportunity to play with rig tuning and consistently study the results. Finding the right light-air rig-trim to widen our upwind groove and keep the boat moving was a real learning curve.
Real fun with very different yachts in terms of design, size, age. The Swedish rating under which we race has proven to be better than we expected, giving very close adjusted times, often winning or losing by seconds, whatever the yacht. In fact, almost any time we lost or gained a position, we could clearly spot the reason. What we did right and what we did wrong. We have actually institutionalized a brief after-sail “lesson learned” session!
About 20 yachts took part. Considering the proximity to Marstrand, protected and deep waters and the stunning surroundings, we are hoping that participation will increase next season. We all like more fights, more starts, more contenders.
It was the first season we raced Veloce on a regular basis and the first time at KMS sailing club.
Great to be able to race in spite of the pandemic. The whole thing was self-managed and communication took place on Facebook. We tried to record and re-play each race through RaceQs with more or less success at the beginning. Towards the end however, nobody was recording the race any longer.
Personally, while I like RaceQs crowd-sourced model, I experience the app poor as gps signal is often lost when in standby and the autostart function rarely works.
See you on the water in spring fellow sailors at KMS…. and to-be sailors in the area.