No pictures, there really wasn't time. I can barely recall all the work we did, but I know I lost 10lbs in the last week, from skipping meals and long long days. It was all worth it though, this week and the last 9 months, as the boat not only got in the water in time for the first races, she came out fast and looking great!
Here's a quick summary:
Longboarded the bottom, and applied 6 coats of interprotect. This generally sucked, but the interprotect was actually a real peach to work with. Sanded up nice to around 320 and gave a great finish. Put VC17 on it (about an hour before launch) and it looks good, although the orange color is distressing to both Niki and myself. We can't wait for it to turn blue!
Installed all the hardware. I did this whenever paint was drying, or the water running off. This continued until literally the last hour before raceday.
Launched the boat late friday with Niki, Ray, Josh and my Dad, got the rig up, denamed it, Niki renamed it (yes, the boat is really named Peanut!) , sat down and had a beer with Kevin, got up early Sat morning to tune and headed out to the races in a pretty strong shifty NWer. Reports on the dock range from 20-25, and I'd side with the 25. Let me just tell you, just about the most stressful part of this project was sailing this brand new (to me) boat, which wasn't entirely finished and hadn't even seen daylight for 3 years, into big breeze. The boat was pounding pretty hard, and I could see dust coming out of the fore and aft hatches!
I had a truly excellent crew, and their skill kept me calm, and even got us to win the day with two second places, giving us a 1 point edge over the next boat.
It's been a pretty crazy winter, and nothing more than the last couple days. Today I had a chance to slow down, clean the boat (we kept stepping on shavings and bits of glass all race!) and think about the whole thing. A couple things come to mind:
The old adage about figuring out what your boat needs (time, money) and then doubling that figure is pretty accurate. I estimated 200hrs, and ended up at a bit over 400. It was a bit much really, but now that we've gone sailing on our new boat, it all makes perfect sense!
Sailing and boats are wonderful, but it's the people involved that really make it worthwhile, and usually possible in the first place. There are dozens of people that have helped in this project in one way or another, and many of them haven't even seen the boat! Some of my experts (boat builders, Shields sailors, materials techs) aren't even in this time zone. The people close to home have been amazing as well, we had a ton of help working on the boat, launching the boat and putting it all together. The last week especially impressed me, as friends and family came out of the woodwork to make the boat sail on time, and race well. It will be another post where I thank everyone by name, but for right now; you know you are, THANKS.
For the first race, I drove, Josh B came out and absolutely rocked the house doing tactics and jib, Josh's friend Christian was our expert boatspeed guy (although I think his sportboating self would resent the term "speed" being applied to our Shields) and Niki did bow. The day started out a breezy NWer, and luckily we had time to practice our upwind and downwind sailing a little bit before the race. This also gave us some time to load and stretch our shrouds out (about 3/16") and retighten just in time. I botched the first start, but we had had conservative tactics and good speed that got us into second, behind Kevin in 150 and ahead of 126. Next start wasn't a great one either, but it enabled us to get right early, which worked out great. We rounded the top mark in second to Not Passis/Farr40 guys/Quantum guy on 63, but Gary on 196 ended up sneaking around us both while we played cat and mouse. He held on to win the second race, with 63 following us in. The boat came out first for the day with 4 points, 150 in second with 5, and 196 with 6. Tight spread, but we're only going to get better at this!
I've still got some work to do: Dad and I are going to put the toerails on, and I've got a few tiny issues to sort of with parts. I was thrilled to see that almost everything we did in terms of rigging fit perfectly and worked great (with our schedule, there wouldn't have been time to fix a thing) This week I'm going to photo and make notes on all the cool parts of our boat, and do a rigging highlight, just in case people want to try some of our tricks.
Right now though, it feels great to sit here and enjoy my sunburn, while staring at the one good photo of Peanut in the water.
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