Cowes Week 2011, minus 2

August 4, 2011

Yesterday Floris, Hidde, Leen and myself joined Harry, Sophie and Joost Nijhof, who where already on the Island. Today Joost and Joost came over from Amsterdam and Vlijmen, whilst Peter Morton came over from his cottage.

So now we have three(!) Joosts and some other people. To get this tripple Joost problem out of the way, from now on we will call them -in order of appearances- Heikens, Dantuma and Nijhof.

Harry and Nijhof had already unloaded WINSOME for 75%, so there was little to be done to get the lovely old lady in optima forma Solent Racing mode.

With Harry, Peter, Leen, Dantuma, Heikens, Hidde, Floris and myself, we will race Cowes Week 2011. After our two practice events, Easter regatta and Round the Island Race, today was our first real Cowes Week training. It started off with a lot off rain. From 13:00 weather improved, so we were out on the water. A few upwind downwind runs showed that we are actually a good team, though there is still some room for improvement.

At the end of the day we hoisted our improved Ruby and the brand spanking new Number I Genoa. I cannot describe how beautiful they both looked. Ruby gave us 0.4 knot of better boat speed down wind and the new Genoa looked just lovely.

When entering the Medina, we (Nijhof) noted that the engine cooling was not working, so we sailed WINSOME almost up to her berth and completed with a a 3 minute engine run. Leen analyzed the problem and it turned out that the water inlet, was also letting air in… Tomorrow this will be fixed.

Tomorrow morning after Berthon has finished working on our engine, we will sail out for another practice run, tack up to Lepe Spit and sail with Team Holland in the afternoon.

As we are competing with both FEVER and YES! in the same class, we will have to be prepared, for some serious racing, starting on saturday.

More on our final preps tomorrow,

Regards,

Boj

Post by Boj | August 4, 2011 |