Wednesday night races

Prairie Gold has entered the Constitution Yacht Club Wednesday night races! Buoyed by our success in the New Year’s day race I decided to give the Wednesday evening races a go. We have now entered two races and have learned that the winds are really blowing in May 2015.

Our first race was quite something. Winds were gusting over 30kts apparent as we were lining up for the start. We realized that although we are a cruising boat, our furling headsail and main was a great advantage. The racing boats had no option to change sails nor to reef, but we did. About half of the boats didn’t even try spinnakers, ourselves included. And for us that was good. We started upwind with deeply reefed main and reefed 135 genoa. After several tacks we rounded the windward mark and then sailed butterfly downwind. Of course, unlike other boats we could now sail with full 135 genoa and main.

But back to the start – In January on New Years day I screwed up the start. Tonight we nailed it – well nearly. We were third over the start line and at top speed. We tacked up wind and had many rail dippers. It was fun to tack and use starboard tack to block other boats out. Now I say it as fun to tack, but the crew were making comments about not needing to go to the gym tomorrow.

Of course we finished last – our PHRF rating is so far worse than the other boats. But we only finished last by a whisker - well we finished last.  Can’t wait to see what our adjusted time is.

But unfortunately there was drama on the high seas. One boat dismasted! Fortunately, no one was injured. Another boat lost her sheets, they snapped in the high winds. But we finished! I guess we achieved our objective not to be last in all races.  The racing boat Shout nearly lost two of their crew overboard. They had their spinnaker out and nearly broached sending crew towards the harbor waters.

In our second race, last night, there was an element of nervousness on the docks because the winds were pounding again. At the startline everyone called in to the race committee boat that they would sail without spinnaker. We counted down to the start of the race and we crossed the starting line first. That was our first victory.

Quickly we were being caught by faster boats but for a while we were holding our own given our slower boat speed. The finish was quite exhilarating since the racing boat Eagle was hunting us down and as we turned the last mark to head up wind to the finish line she came to our side. We trimmed and got every 100^th of a knot out of Prairie Gold that we could. We finished together. One of our crew suggested that we should have extended our bowsprit so that we would have crossed the line before Eagle. (I didn't mention that Eagle started behind us in a different class of boat. So although we finished together she got around the course in a shorter time. But let's wait for the handicap adjusted times.)

It turned out that the winds died down and were very patchy in the evening. Maybe next time we will take our assym spinnaker out.

Installation of a bowsprit

We fly our asymmetric spinnaker frequently and normally attach the tackline on the anchor roller. Of course this leads to tangled lines on the anchor during gybes. In the heart of winter I decided to cheer myself up by ordering a bowsprit from Catalina Direct, that is manufactured by Selden.

There were three major steps to installation:

Attach an adapter to one of the anchor rollers to hold the bowsprit.

Attach two padeyes to the deck for attachment of the inboard end of bowsprit – one for the retracted position and the other for the extended position.

Couple the inboard adapter, which connects to the padeyes, to the bowsprit with pop rivets.

Most of the process was simple except for two steps. Drilling through the stainless steel anchor holder (used three bits for that) to attach the outboard adapter and then attaching the pop rivets. You might ask why the latter was so difficult. I have learned that hardware stores only stock pop rivet guns for rivets up to 3/16th of an inch. The rivets that come with the bowsprit are ¼ inch rivets. I tried to support local stores by driving around and getting a rivet gun locally but finally broke down and ordered from Amazon.

This afternoon I had the fun of inserting those rivets.

Beneath are some pictures of the assembled device. It will be a lot of fun to sail with. I am not sure we will go any faster but at least we look the part.  

 The bowsprit installed with a soft shackle (see previous post) and a block for the tackline

A close up of the outboard adapter with four bolts holding it to the anchor roller.

Soft shackle attachment of sheets to headsail provides superior performance

In my last post I showed the process of making soft shackles. Today I was able to connect our two new eye spliced sheets to the head sail via the soft shackle and then take Prairie Gold for a test sail. From now on there is no going back to bowlines to attach sheets. When one tacks with the soft shackle and eye spliced sheet there are no knots to get caught on the shrouds. I was out solo today and was able to tack in apparent winds up to 25kts with ease and the sheets came through so fast it was not necessary to use a winch handle to tighten the sheets.

I am so impressed with soft shackles I have added three more: one for a block for the tackline and two for blocks for the sheets of the spinnaker.

Here is a picture of the sheets and soft shackle while sailing. The shackle is red and I have added a velcro strap (lavender) to keep the knot at the clew of the mast. At this point I haven't cut the ends of the dyneema line since I have been waiting to put a load in the knot. Just accomplished that, so now its time to cut the loose ends away.

Soft Shackle Construction – take home message – get the right line!

Having seen the virtues of soft shackles I decided to make rather than purchase for a price of about $35 a piece. We recently spliced eyes in the end of our sheets and would like to be able to rapidly attach and detach the sheets from the sails. To achieve this we tested a purchased soft shackle and it worked really well. I looked online, watched videos of how to do this and decided it was time to try it. Last night 6mm line arrived and the task was impossible. It’s necessary to feed the line inside the cover of the line (see pictures beneath) but I had the wrong line. I couldn’t sleep and in the middle of the night found a post that stated the specific line to use “Amsteel BlueDyneema AS-78 single braid 3/16 inch”. Importantly there is no core to this line, only the cover, which provides the strength. This line only costs $1.08 per foot at West Marine. Having purchased 30 feet this morning I went ahead and tried again. First attempt was a success. There is a great website that takesyou through the process with a good explanation and a calculator to pre-determine how much line to cut, and where to feed the line.

I have now quickly made two of these soft shackles and will attach to my headsail once the wind is a little lower.  To make a soft shackle of 2.65 inch diameter requires 41 inches of line which costs only ~$3.60. It takes 10 minutes to make and I will use them extensively.

A quick warning – don’t get colored line since the dye comes off very quickly.

Beneath is a sequence of the pictures of making the shackle.

 Feeding the line through the inside of line

 Open loop at the end of the spliced line

 Make a hole through the central line

 Feed the cover through the central core

 Pull tight

 Tie a diamond knot - I then tensioned it and will leave the loose ends attached until the knot has been under serious working load. Then the loose ends will be cut off.

The knot feeds through the eye and the cover is pulled over the core to tighten down onto the knot. With the line working loads up to at least 5,600 lbs are possible.

What an awful winter

One of the last posts mentioned that we intended to sail every month of 2015 having only missed March in 2014. Well were we in for a surprise in Boston for this winter - record snowfall in a month, all time record snowfall. Suffice it to say, February and March were not conducive to sailing. Now that its April however we have already managed to get out three times and have lots of catch up to do.

Over the winter we have had several repair jobs. Yolande has put her sewing skills to the test with repairs on our dodger. She has also become intrigued by soft-shackles. We purchased new sheets for our genoa and she has eye spliced the ends and we have purchased a soft shackle from west marine. They work great and prevent the hangup of the bowline knots on the shroud during a tack. We have installed one and will now attempt to make the second soft shackle. Will post pictures and comments later when we have learned the art of making the soft shackle. We are told they make great gifts for sailors. Watch out sailing friends, you know what you might get now.

New Year’s Day Race

Our goal was not to come DFL and we achieved it. Actually, we were pretty pleased with our performance. 10 entries, 2 decided not to start and we came 6^th out of 8 who raced. There were a couple of notable parts that were really fun too: gybing around red buoy #12 and pulling away from a similar boat to Prairie Gold on the windward leg.

New years day was chilly, starting in the 20s and climbing to about 30F by the end of the race. Winds were about 15-20kts gusting to 25kts apparent out of the South West so we were set for good conditions for the race. With hand warmers in my gloves I went to the skippers meeting not knowing what would happen. Donuts coffee, a lot of chatter, and about 1 minute of instruction about the race. But it was nice to get to know some of the competition. The course was a simple triangle– start line to green buoy #13, fall off to port to red #12, gybe to port and head for the finish line.

We met on Prairie Gold discussed the course, and disembarked and sailed around to feel out spots for wind direction and then practiced our start. The race was a pursuit race in which each of the boats has a handicap based on the relative performance, assuming equal crew. The first boat SLICE set off at 12 noon and we were scheduled to leave at 12:00:48. We had time for two practice starts where we practiced the clock countdown: the first was awful the second pretty darned good. So we set ourselves up for the start with 5 minutes to go. Suddenly it was 12 noon and we realized that we were too far from the line and so we “put our foot down”, so to speak. The good news, our goal was to hit the start line with speed and not to have a false start. Tick that one off. However we were about 30 seconds late. I put that down to my error. But we were off and having fun.

On the first of the three parts to the race we tried to de-reef the mainsail but it was stuck. We are not certain why but that cost us another 20 seconds or so. We quickly decided that although we didn’t have optimum sail area it would be best to keep going rather than mess around with the sail. Quickly two boats were up our tail – an Island Packet (IS Fearr Cara) and a Beneteau 351 (Jeroboam). Looking back at the start sheet I realize as I write this that the Island Packet was due to start 12 seconds before us. I can only imagine they miscalculated too given that they were behind us. Both boats were closing as we were coming to the green buoy, our first turn. However, IS Fearr Cara had miscalculated the layline to the turn and was too low and had to tack twice to get on line. This slowed their progress considerably. However, Jeroboam was getting closer.

Jeroboam is a great boat and her skipper, Jonathan Green is a great skipper having crossed the N. Atlantic solo, sailed in the Newport to Bermuda race. Here is their blogsite for those interested. 

We rounded the green buoy and were now heading downwind towards the red buoy. We could have really done with a full mainsail at this point. Jeroboam was catching.

During this leg of the race the crew started to click and began talking to one another helping one another with suggestions. We came to the red buoy and gybed around it almost perfectly. Indeed this was needed because we had to stop Jeroboam from putting her nose in between us and the buoy. She was a mere 10 feet behind us.

After the gybe we were heading upwind. This is where a reefed main and a small jib (the headsail) worked to our advantage. The reason for the small jib was that our 135% genoa (the big headsail) is torn and we are having a new one made. Since in this third leg we were heading to the wind our apparent wind speed increased so smaller sail area was a great benefit. We slowly and steadily pulled away from Jeroboam. Nothing like having the right sail plan, if only for the wrong reasons.

We could see the finish line, at which point the big fast racing boats Eagle, Twist, Ye Old School, Black Seal all started to pass us. They had handicaps of up to 8 minutes and it was pretty awesome so see them sail by. During this period we hit the only no wind spot in the harbor. Suddenly, for what felt like an eternity, we had 1kt of wind. This is when all of these racing boats passed us. I am not certain if they found better wind (kudos to them if they did) or whether their boat design sails through low wind better than ours. Whichever it was it was quite a sight. Then the wind picked up and we finished sixth. 

But who won the race? Chuck on a C&C 30 called SLICE. He had the slowest boat in the fleet, had the scratch start time and sailed a great race. Congratulations to Chuck. Yolande who was at the start and finish line learned that one of the boats started the race 2 minutes early. With no return to the start were they disqualified? If so, were we actually 5^th. Doesn’t matter either way. We achieved all of our objectives – get out on New Years Day, sail, have fun and laughs be competitive and enjoy the company of friends.

Here is Prairie Gold Finishing

Afterwards we quickly dropped the mainsail, put the canvas cover back on Prairie Gold (although we left the headsail in place for a quick turnaround for sailing again) and went beneath for a beer, and hot tomato soup.

Thanks to the crew Bob, Linda and Rudy for such a great time. This was my first official race and I enjoyed every minute of it. When my son called me later, I told him all the tall stories of the race and said that I was really pleased with our first race. To which he laughed “First race. Hmm. You always race other boats when you are on the water.” I guess he is correct, but there is something special about trying a real race where your competitors know they are in a race also.

December 27th sail

We now keep the boat on the water for the winter so that its possible for Phil to get rid of the winter blues with a little sail now and then. On Friday, with Rudy's help, he took the cover off of Prairie Gold and put on the mainsail and 90% jib. On Saturday temperatures climbed into the upper 40s and Phil and two friends set sail for a couple of hours. It was a glorious time and is the first occasion in Boston harbor that we didn't see another sailboat sailing when we have been out.