Racing 8-23/best 4th place ever

Finally had more Shields series racing this last weekend. I say finally since it seems like our season has been chopped up with all the other events we've had going on, cancelled races etc. Our fleet has still had pretty good participation all year, but I think if we had a more cohesive schedule we could gain full numbers. Shouldn't say too much about that, as thats the kind of thing that gets you volunteered for fleet captain.

Favorite thing about racing this weekend was the short 1mile courses. This was to allow for a 3rd race (making up B1) and it was loads more fun! I would be all about doing 1 mile races as regular racing, and would actually be for 3 race days but I imagine I'm the only one.

Last weekend of racing had, guess what, good breeze out of the south-west! Never thought I'd see that more than once or twice a summer, but it's been our standard condition this year. Onboard it was Niki-bow, Jocelyn-pit/compass/jib grinder, Jacob-jib, Josh-main/spin and I drove as usual.
Races 1 and 2 were good; decent starts, sound tactics, 2 firsts. Had new sails aboard but upwind boatspeed still seemed a bit off. I think this was a headstay lenght issue. I tightened it up to ~47.5", and generally felt stuck all day, despite backing it off to 48". I think in future I'm going to err on too loose until I get decent repeatable numbers for this boat.
Race 3 started the same way, but then we F'd up! We were on port, looked to be crossing 63, who had 196 just to weather of them. As we crossed 196 they hailed protest, which is where things got interesting. I thought we were clean, Josh was 100% sure of it, but we did our circles anyway which dropped us back to 6th. I later heard from the boat to leeward that they thought 196 had ducked, and 150 said they definitely saw a duck, so I'm glad we circled despite thinking we were clear. Reasons being:
a)other boats saw a duck
b)even if they didn't duck/didn't have to duck, it's still a trip to the protest room, and one we'd likely lose
c)at the end of the day I feel like we retained the mutual respect that is so important in this fleet.

"C" is the important one to me (although losing bar/food time in the room sucks) as it seems like our fleet is the last place I sail that still has super friendly competition, where people err on the side of caution when it comes to these situation. My feeling is that it would take only a couple incidents (protests, disagreements over rules) to push our fleet into the "offensive rules" mindset, like so many other fleets. I definitely don't want to be the guy that starts that slide, and if it means eating circles, thats a small price to pay.

We ended up clawing our way back up, and being behind gave us some opportunity to compare boatspeed with the other fast boats. Having been there, I think our advantage is in upwind boathandling, and compass course. This would explain the feeling of being fast when we're not near other boats, and feeling same-speed/slow when we're next to someone on the same board. The upwind finish was truly excellent, as we (88, 196, 63, 150) all seemed to have the lead in the last 3rd of the race, and it was full of crossings, leebows and slam tacks. It would have been nice to get another bullet, but 4th in that tight pack was satisfying for its own reasons.

To get back to this blogs techinical bent there are 2 small rigging changes I'll discuss in the next time around. New jib halyard, more or less identical to the last one but made with white cover instead of black. This is all so that we can have a preset mark for hoisting the jib, which is often a problem. Helping to standardize our jib halyard settings is a new tack strop I've come up with. Hard to explain without a photo (forthcoming) but it's one piece of line, with which you can hold the jib tight to the forestay and also down to the tack shackle, without any kind of knots. It's all in the goal of getting repeatable settings.