Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Managing off wind sailing

At the Ware River regatta we were presented with lots of breeze and some short steep chop. The downwind legs were interesting. If flying too high the rudder would occasionally ventilate or stall and result in a crash. My approach was to shorten up the wand and to drop the ride height. I'm not sure that's the best approach, so more experimentation is needed in those conditions. At any rate, I complied another video of the weekend's sailing. The battery died before things got really extreme so I didn't get the pitchpole on video.

3 comments:

Limbic Candy said...

Joe,

I've really enjoyed your recent videos - seaweed and all. I'm hoping to sneak a cam past my wife ("It's just a new tiller, darling!") to use as a self-coaching aid. I've three weeks of sailing coming up on the sea in North Wales, which will make a big change to my usual pond sailing. Still, with no Moth buddies nearby, I rely on gleaning what I can from blogs. Keep it coming!


Cheers,


John

Graham Simmonds said...

Hi Jo - those crashes look painful! Now that you have the Mach2 foil, do you think you have enough gearing on? You can see the wand shoot forward just before every crash. In my boat (with a short wand) you can feel the flap really working, stopping the boat fly out of the water.

The other question is how short is your wand? I am looking at approx 1.15M shortened and 1.23M full length.

Joe Bousquet said...

Hi Graham (and John). Part of my problem, similar to John's problem, is that I'm sailing in a vacuum with no other moths, certainly no other Mach2s, nearby to compare with. I also have a direct push rod as opposed to the intricate system under the M2's bonnet. I'll post pix and dimensions and maybe you can tell me if I'm in the ball park.

Thanks,
Joe