88 winter update

Compared to previous years, I'm doing very little to 88 this winter, but we still have a couple new ideas to try. I'm making new angled risers for the jib sheet cleats. The stock Harken ones work fine, but with the addition of the extreme angle fairlead, the cleats overhang the risers by quite a bit. It seems like the hard edge would be a line catcher, so I wanted something that kept lines out from beneath the cleat assembly. This are just chunks of teak, at an 18" angle, and beveled so a line should slide up and over the cleat. The angled cut visible on the right one is to line up with the front of our control console.

Someone asked me recently about the legality of this system (above), as they counted 3 blocks per side and figured it meant 6:1 Well, it's definitely 2:1. The line goes up from the car, through tbe block on the clew and back to the car. This makes 2:1 advantage, as when the line is pulled it moves the clew closer to the car at a rate of 1" for every 2" pulled. After that is where it gets confused, as even though it goes through the car block, then sideways to the ratchet block, there is no extra mechanical advantage as both of those objects are fixed. I'd be happy to sit down with a ruler if anyone wants to test this ! The whole thing was added to the class rules years ago, allowing for 2:1 sheeting:

8:21 Jib Sheets
The jib sheets may be rigged with either one or two parts using one or both tracks. (See Specifications 8.7, 8.19, 8.20, 8.22, 8.23) and for the additional cleat 8.6 Cleats
There shall be bow and stern mooring cleats. The type, number and location of all other cleats are optional. However, cleats shall not be of a type or in a location that will alter the lead of the main, jib or spinnaker sheets. The additional about changing the lead is a tricky one, as you couldn't go straight from the jib car to an inboard cleat, as that cleat would then alter the lead of the sheet by pulling the car inboard. The rules require an outboard block to avoid changing the lead, which works out fine as the ratchet is most effective when turning the line 90deg as shown. Luckily this is one of those class rules that got added on after half the Newport fleet just did it anyway!
Niki took advantage of a touchscreen computer at Costco to add yet another mark of Peanut. I think we accidentally set the drawing as the background image, screensaver etc so whoever buys the display model will be quite confused...

Our 2009 jib sheet setup (above) worked great, but took a bit of time to rig before sailing, as we have to run the jib sheet all the way through the car, sail and ratchet blocks. Originally we kept it rigged, and used a large keypin shackle to unhook the 40mm blocks from the sail, but the big shackle meant we ended up 2 blocking the sheet sometimes. See below for the 2 blocked sheet. This was our first daysail, and we had no tack height but the sheet 2 blocked even with a 4" strop at the tack.

To fix this this problem, i got rid of the big shackle, and lashed 2 29mm Ti Lites to each jibs clew, as seen in the first picture. This worked fine, but required running the line through all the blocks (including running the line through the ratchet, practiaclly guaranteed to be be backwards) so I wanted to go back to the original easily rigged blocks-on-shackle approach, but without the 2 blocking problem. It took some work, but theres a Harken shackle that fits over the giant clew grommet (no idea why we don't get a simple ring instead..) but is still really low profile to avoid 2 blocking. Should work great, and means we can leave the sheet rigged. Easy rigging=more likely to daysail!

Partner shims:

Wooden box partner jig

Our old system for shimming the partners fit well and looked great, but was kind of a bear to change between races. More often than not we'd think about moving shims, but wouldn't have the time or the inclination to pound the shims out of place. This year we'll be doing something different, with permanent side shims to keep the mast centered, and smaller, looser fore/aft shims. The sideshims are held in place with 2 screws tapped into the partner box, and fore and aft shims have a notch on top, which should make it easier to make it past the vang bail, which interefered with adding shims behind the mast. I'd also like to try sailing with no shims, and see how the mast floats or pumps. Got to keep trying new things or it gets boring!

Chicago's strictly sail was last weekend, and Fleet 3 had #126 on display. She's for sale, so if anyone wants to buy into a great 1d racing fleet let me know!

Shie... er Etchells1279?

The Jaguar Cup series is where Etchells sailors play in winter.  It's a 4 weekend series, where the boats stay rigged and mast up ready to go so that after flying in you can launch and go.  Much is said about the world class competition, but my main motivation for begging a ride this time around was that it was sailing in Miami in winter!  

Flying down, I took it as a very very bad omen that the inflight movie was "Love Happens."  I finished my magazine, couldn't sleep and ended up watching the whole damn thing.  Terrible movie.   

We were staying at a hotel on a couple minutes walk from the boat, which is very cool.  Random midnight fire alarms aside, this was pretty sweet.  

Morning of the first race was a bit disturbing, as it was not the Miami I had signed up for.  15-20kts out of the northwest and temps in the 40's made it seem like frostbiting in Chicago.  Frosbiting on one of those days we all blow of sailing and play foosball. We sailed out of the harbor straight downwind for about 5 miles, and did not get a chance to put up a chute.  I was a bit nervous about this, as I was theortetically doing bow, which is a job thats come my way about all of 4 times.  Add to that the nuking wind and really unfamiliar boat, and it was looking a bit hairy.  

We pooched the first start a bit, and ended up on the wrong side of the course 

putting us deep in the 30's (54 boats total.)   Add to that we were coming in overstood on the port tack layline, with a ton of very fast (and mostly out of control) boats with spinnakers bearing down on us.  Somewhat more alarming is that I looked down and saw the spinnaker pole trailing along beside the boat.  In the "more terrifying category than the last thing" column was the fact that our lee upper shroud was attached to the spinnaker pole, and therefore not to the boat! Until we could fix this Aaron couldn't tack or luff up, so we were just going to have to risk it with the big line of starboard tackers.

How does an upper shroud come loose like that?   The boat we were on was using hitch pins (shown below) instead of cotter pins or rings to hold their shroud clevis pins to the chainplates. One of our pins worked it's way loose, the clevis pin fell out and voila!, no stbd upper.  Why would you use such a temporary and unsecure way to hold your rig up?  Etchells supposedly switch the postion on the shrouds on the chainplate in very high wind, moving the upper behind the lower in order to stablize the mast by adding bend.  However,  everyone I talked to (including Bill H who won the regatta) said that they never do this. Sometimes just because you _can_ do a thing doesn't mean you should do it, and definitely doesn't mean you should have hitch pins to do it with. 

After clearing the wall of stbd tackers and such, we started tearing around the boat looking for a spare pin.  No luck whatsoever on the pin front, and no gear on the boat had a large enough pin to support the upper with.  We finally pulled a 3/16" shackle off a block, used that to hold the lower shroud in place and swapped the lowers pin to the upper.  This marred up the shackle pin a bit, but less us get in where we could repin the entire rig and retune it for the next day.  So, here's my day one report:

Race 1:  40ish before windward mark, sailed past it in general direction of mainland, retired.  Settings were:  3/4 pins, sheer terror.

Race 3: Drinking at yacht club to returns feeling to numb feelings in body and soul. 

Race 3: Lunch at Chili's. Quesadilla's were pretty iffy. Walk in rain.

As far as gear goes, it was the most I've ever had on for sailing and I was still wicked cold.  Harken shoes were good, Musto pants awesome, 4 layers of fleece good, but my f#%king Harken spray top was either chafing bloody spots on my neck from the velcro, or wide open letting water pour down my torso.  No good!

Day 2 started colder (how? Why?!) and windier than day 1 but at least it wasn't raining.  That morning was probably the least I've wanted to sail ever, but Fred was gung ho and Aaron was determined to get me to race an Etchells at least once, as this was the 3rd time we'd tried to sail one together! My record with Aaron is spotty, Farr40 regatta-no air, etchells regatta-no air, harbor springs regatta-1 nice day and then way too much air...  Very very fast jib and main run out to the course, with water over the bow, and I still hadn't put up a chute!  The first day 2 photo on the www.johnpaynephoto.com site is of us experiencing a jib and main gybe.  

We got a decent start, and were in the low teens around the first windward mark, when we were hit from behind just after rounding.  The other boat made a lot of noise and we'd started circling before realized it was their foul not ours.   Although we tacked well inside the 3 boat length circle, we were well around the mark and couldn't have fouled them.  Ah well!  We clawed back a bit to get 18th.  I did bow with no giant mistakes, just a lot of small embarassments!  A couple notes on how the Etchells differs from the Shields in the front:

-the pole is larger, and since the Etchells has a smaller rig, its kind of funky swinging it around up there. 

-they are so much easier to hike

-this boat had the old style end fittings, not the fancy jam-in angled jaw type, which sucks

-the jib sheets system should in theory be a lot better than ours.  We both have 2:1, but the Etchells adds a fine tune under the deck for about 10:1 purchase, as well as having a jib thats about 75% the size of the Shields jib.  However, this boat had a bunch of odd leads and friction from plain bearing (!) Ronstan blocks, so it was actually significantly harder than the Shields.  If I had an Etchells it would be a bit different.  

-The bow has lots of neat controls to play with: Jib sheet gross, jib sheet fine, tack height, lead car and halyard fine and gross tune.  I would ditch the lead car adjustment, as this boat had the 2 sides tied together, which meant you couldn't adjust them independently for different sea states on different tacks.  It was nice playing the tack and hal fine tune though.

-The spin halyard comes through a hole in the deck, with a cleat, and is tiny little 5mm something or other rope, which slips like crazy.  I made an ass out of myself by taking forever to get the halyard up, and it's probably 90% technique, but I really hate this system for the halyard. 

-Drivingwise the Etchells and Shields are very similar, with the Etchells having more helm but a freer rudder, making it kind of a wash.  You have to steer the Etchells more in tacks, but it seems like it would go upwind with less helm motion, and more of a constant rudder angle.  Very interested to try this again soon.  

Second race we did well on the start, and worked really well together to get to the top mark in good company.  We were 4th at one point, but lost a bit of speed to get passed downwind by a couple boats and ended up 8th, which was a good way to go out for the weekend.  It was cool being next to a world champ this race, and fun to check our progress vs the other great boats.  

Overall it was a bit of a disaster, and miserable sailing weather, but I still had fun.  Really the best part was racing with Aaron and Fred, who are both very experienced, patient with my bow antics and generally great fun to sail with.  I would do these events again happily, and hope to sail with these guys again some time in the future.  

Edit: Naturally, since it's me, I made friends with the BBYC fat orange cat.  Below is  the only photo I have from a weekends sailing in Miami. 

Stick a fork in it...

Seasons definiteley over!
We got one last great sail in on the 18th. Sunny, flat and breezy. We took the boat downtown and went past Navy Pier.

Then the inevitable terror of haulout/trailering the boat. I'm really thinking next year we might just sail the boat to the yard, and save me the nailbiting trailer chase.


Whats on the schedule for boatwork this winter? Jack! There are lots of jobs I can think of, like draining/sealing the deadwood, fairing the bottom, etc etc. but the boat is good enough for what we're doing with it next year, so I think I might just take the winter off 88 projects for once, and save a bunch of money and frostbitten fingers. Nationals next year is TBD, and depending on where they hold it we may or may not go, which could change this plan, but right now I think it's pretty light winter projects.

Seasons End

We had the last 2 series races yesterday; an absolutely perfect way to end a year of sailing. It was forecast to be light westerly, and we had me, Niki, Jacob and Katie. I was looking forward to it as I wanted our last racing to be better than the OCS recovery we had at the end of Nationals, and because the light air would give us some time to tune the boat better for that condition.


Race 1: We had the season wrapped up, so today was the day I was going to ask our regular crew to drive, as they're all great sailors and would do well on the helm. Jacob was the only one available, so he drove race 1. After some practice on the way out, he got a great start and looked good upwind. I was doing main/spin, which is my favorite crew job on a Shields. It gave me a good chance to play with the new mast shape, and I felt like we had it going well. This was one of those races thats pretty boring to write about, as Jacob won the start, extended on every leg and then won by a giant margin. The funny thing was we rounded our last windward mark just as some Etchells were sailing downwind near us, and we spent the entire mile leg being next to the same 3 etchells while they luffed and rolled each other. We actually finished nucleus of a blob of 6 etchells, who seemed to be using us as a pick! I think next time we'll just drop chute and let them by, although it was pretty fun to watch them all jockey for position around us.

Next race was more exciting, probably too much soo. I drove this one, and really pooched the start when 39 came up from leeward and seemed intent on keeping both of us away from the favored pin. 130 won the pin, but was over early and had to restart. We sailed up on the favored board for a couple minutes, only to watch it become unfavored fast as 130, who restarted launched ahead out on the right. We were about 4th at this point, and got tacked on by just about everyone before we escaped right. We looked great, and seemed to be leading, but were chagrined to see the rest of our fleet sail to the short mark when we kept going for the long one! We reached down to the short mark in last place, made a couple gains playing the shifts, and rounded midpack again, only to have the boat ahead have a terrible rounding, on which we owed them room and had to sail about 4 lengths off the wind. All the boats behind caught up again, and we were last yet again. We were quick enough upwind to play the shifts and take the lead again, then we thankfully went to the correct mark with 196 ducking us at the mark (they sailed an awesome race, but lost their lift at the end and couldn't quite make it), extended downwind and then again upwind to finish with a nice margin, and again with a bunch of etchells. We now know what the heck the "W5b" course is! ps its 2x short course, then finish upwind.

It was a really satisfying day. The first race Jacob horizoned the fleet, and the second we had about 3 last-to-first rallys which made for some excitement. More satisfying is we really learned a couple new gears for light air upwind, and I'm looking forward to applying them next year. 88 won the season handily.

A bit bittersweet going off the water for the last real race, but we left the club right away to celebrate our first wedding anniversary, and had an awesome night on the town! We've got a couple daysails planned, and at least one more beercan on the schedule. For winter we've got a couple neat tricks to put in place, so there should be a few more tech updates.

Thanks to the crew of 88, as well as all the friends of Peanut who made this season a ton of fun.

Photos from the Big Chair

Erik Schneider is our regular PRO for One Design Racing, also Shields Nationals. While running the show he also managed to find a couple photos of us. While 1974photo.com is down, please enjoy his images.

This is an _awesome_ Shields photo from a couple weeks ago on one of our heavy air days.


This is warming up for Day 3 of Nationals. As much as the purple chute has grown on me, I'm still surprised by it's purpleness in photos.
88 getting ready to do what it apparently does best: go upwind in slop
Our crew from earlier this year: me, Brian, Jocelyn, Jacob and Niki

Shields Nationals recap

Sailing Nationals was great fun, and great racing. One of the defining moments came when we were standing around the cranes helping out of town boats haul out. People were poking around other boats, talking setup here and there, all the while people (including the champ) are leaping off the seawall. Everyone was just so friendly, it really showed what our fleet was all about.

We had a good time on 88, but it's only fair to acknowledge we didn't have as good a result as we'd expected. After having 2 really excellent seasons in which we won just about everything we sailed against everyone we could I felt like we'd be top 5 at least, but we ended up 7th overall. That said, as Niki and talk about the regatta I think we're both really happy with our first Nats. The experience of getting to race against some of the best boats in our class was really thrilling. I always felt like we just outside the pack of 3 or 4 front runners, and if we had done just a little bit better we would have been up high in the results.

Good times aside, I really like to learn something constructive from every day of sailing, and we picked up quite a bit from this event. Some of the things we could be doing better:

-Light air upwind speed. For whatever reason we felt slow most of the time in light air. Lots of factors could be at work here, but I think the biggest one is that we just haven't sailed enough light air races! This seasons been really windy, and much of 08 was as well. We felt very well prepared for big breeze, but knew we were a bit weak in the light stuff. Looking at photos from the event, our sail setup usually looks a bit different than the really fast guys. We tend to have less headstay sag, and far more main leech return down low. One interesting thing from a measurement point of view, is that the boats that are at max partner aft/max step forward tended to do better on the later days of the event, and the ones with more moderate step positions tended to do better in the light. This seems like a good reason to experiment with blocking the mast at the partners, something we've been thinking about all season but only really tried once.

-Light air tactics on big courses. In Chicago we're used to the RC adjusting course length depending on wind strength. In big breeze we might do 4-5 mile courses, and in light air it's usually under 4. All of our races were started, and usually ended up around 6 miles. That means that on a 1.5m windward leg, you can had boats separated by up to that same mile and a half! Saying it pays to pick a side is an understatement. In the really light air stuff-like thursdays first race- the favored side was a huge advantage, but changed leg to leg! We tend to be a boat that plays the shifts, and usually ends up going up the middle of the course on the favored tack. After racing we realized we'd been tacking way too much, and some of the tacks were probably due to velocity headers more than actual shifts. Seems like patience is another thing we need in light air.

-laylines. We had 5 or 6 bad layline calls in which we saw boats sail right by us. Part of my usual upwind strategy is to have a really close top third of the beat where we come in in port late enough to really nail the tacking angles, which we didn't end up doing this regatta. Adding to that was all the extra boats around! Even if you called a good layline, you had to anticipate the traffic better as a good layline goes bad once a boat stacks up above or ahead of you.

Those were the couple big shortcomings on 88 I feel. Once the breeze was a little bit up on Saturday, we had 1 good race (2nd) in which we could power the boat up and punch through chop well, at the same time we could play the shifts the way the compass called.

There are far more good things to come out of this event than bad though, and in keeping with the great time we had there are areas we did really well in.

-Starts. Usually my weakest part of the leg, this turned out to be a really high point for us. Part of it was the out of town boats are used to starting in fleets this big, so they tend to go for their own best start instead of trying to mess with whoever happens to be to windward (the OCS we had in race 7 was actually when a Chicago boat sailed under us and took us up). The other part was picking our spot early, and coming in with lots of speed, but still taking big luffs when we needed to. I found myself really looking forward to the starts this regatta, and think it was a good confidence builder for the future.

-It never really blew over 12 or so even on the "windy" last day, but anytime the breeze was up a bit over 6kts I felt really fast both upwind and down. This makes a lot of sense, as most of our teams experience is in bigger breeze.

-Our team really kept it together when things looked bad. In my 10 years of Shields racing, I've been on the fleet3 season winning boat every year, so we've always been confident going into Nationals, and sometimes things go badly early and everyone melts down a bit. This weekend we certainly got tense, but never really lost control. I was really proud of Niki on the bow, as she kept the attitude on the boat light, and kept us working hard to get back what we might have lost. Everyone on 88 is a really good sailor, but they're on the boat because of attitude as well.

-Sponsoring this event with Chicago Yacht Rigging as title sponsor was really rewarding! We got great feedback from people who checked out our boat, and people seemed to really appreciate our involvement. I'd really like to be involved with future National events, as it's a great feeling to do something big for the class.

-Boathandling was great. We never really had bad moves all week, and I feel like we'd gain with every tack on other boats. A couple new tricks appeared on our boat, probably my favorite was how Jocelyn and Brian are working the main in tacks: Brian does a big traveler up to initiate the tack, at the same time Jocelyn is pulling like mad on the fine tune mainsheet. This gives us a lot of weather helm fast, which means I use less rudder as the boat turns up. After the tack, Jocelyn eases the fine tune mainsheet to the pretack postion, plus a bit, so we have a nice ease to sail down on after the tack. Downwind was really great too! We were using our weight really well, and Bam is awesome about timing (and throwing) the main through. Likewise Niki really nailed the gybes this week, and I always felt that we could put the boat wherever we wanted, regardless of how tough the move might be.

The tougher thing to describe was how thrilling the event was, to be getting such quality racing with so many boats in. I love sailing in Chicago, but our races are usually fairly straightforward; get ok start, sail course fast, and watch out for 1 or 2 boats who are near us. Racing 18 boats is only twice the number, but probably 10x the fun!

As an event it was a great success, and it was wonderful to meet so many enthusiastic Shields sailors. I think I met nearly everyone there, and they had nothing but nice things to say about CYC's runnign the event. A lot of that is due to Kevin from 150, who not only put together a great event, but managed to have the best Chicago finish is over 30 years, with a hard fought 2nd, only one point out of first! Great job Yankee Girl!

HL Devore won the event, and he's one of those guys who you're cheering for even if he plants a tack in your face. He's the outgoing (in more ways than one) class president, and has done a nice job for the class, and really deserved this win.

Perhaps the best part about the event was as soon as it was over, both Niki and I started talking about how to do the next one, as we're really hungry for more racing of this level.

Shields Nats done

Will write something better later, but Nats is over. It was a wonderful event, with great racing and camraderie. HL Devore, who is a larger than life character and super nice guy, won and we're really happy for him. 88 didn't do as well as we'd like but still had a great time. The last day was definitely the best, as we had a little more breeze and 88 got a 2nd, followed immediately by an OCS where we came back to 9th.

Big thing is I wanted to get info on the _awesome_ photos taken by Marc Anderson, his site is here:

http://1974photo.com/

Check them out!