Yesterday we competed in the Surf to City passage race which starts from Southport (Gold Coast) and travels to Sandgate (north Brisbane) in the channel between the coast and various islands.
The course is well protected from any real waves for pretty much the entire course. And the course is 50+nm, throw in tacks and gybes and it would easily be more like 60+nm.
This years' Surf to City was by far our most enjoyable having competed twice before and only finishing once with a 5 knot breeze the entire way and it was on the nose.
Yesterday we had Nathan Schmittman on board and he steered and main sheeted us the entire way, Donna handled the jib, while I handled the spinnaker the entire way.
The race start was 9:30am and we finished at 5:27pm, not bad. We had 10-15 with the occasional 20 puff early in the day before the breeze gradually died off during the day to around the 10kt mark. Which all in all made for very pleasant sailing day with a little bit of excitement thrown in here and there.
The two big events for the day were a round up with the kite and a complete knock down mast tip in the water. This was totally our fault there was only mid-teen wind pressure, we just tried to hold our monster black kite through a very very shy part of the course and it didn't pay off. So we got the kite off, Nathan jumped on the keel/centerboard to help us up and discovered a huge palm frond wrapped around the keel which he obviously discarded.
We had some great kite rides soon after these events when we put up our fractional green kite and did some shy kite running to get through some of the narrower channel areas and just kept blasting along when the breeze allowed, while we hiked out like Laser sailors.
Hopefully someone got some photos of us, we didn't take our camera for the first time ever. We just plain out forgot to grab it with everything else we had to do to get ready for the race, which is a bugger because there were so many great people around us that we had good laughs with as we raced. This was also a pleasant change from previous years, to be in amongst other boats that we couldn't previously get anywhere near speed wise and also to have a great social race where in other years we were amongst less social and more 'serious' racers, read; boring even when we were going fast.
Right, so the results are in and we did extremely well considering our mast testing early in the race. We knew we were chasing down the competition very very well in the last quarter of the race and were passing a few boats but to finish in the top 10 of a 20 boat fleet after our swims and multiple kite changes was a surprise.
Initially at the presentation we were actually named as the winner of Division 2, after a quick check of the finish times after the presentation I noticed right away that they had our finish time as a full hour ahead of our actual finish time. So a quiet word with the club and a hand back of the winners prize and I was feeling much better. We ended up with 5th on handicap which we were very happy with.
So on paper at the moment our next race is the Pearl Challenge on 21 February. That's another 50+nm race that will involve windward and leeward sailing and I would not expect to finish in anything less than 12hours. I am currently debating with myself whether to do it or not, we are already entered, but I would like to modify our bow to get to 20ft and not our current 16ft or so waterline. We will (I will) have to decide this week I reckon.
The course is well protected from any real waves for pretty much the entire course. And the course is 50+nm, throw in tacks and gybes and it would easily be more like 60+nm.
This years' Surf to City was by far our most enjoyable having competed twice before and only finishing once with a 5 knot breeze the entire way and it was on the nose.
Yesterday we had Nathan Schmittman on board and he steered and main sheeted us the entire way, Donna handled the jib, while I handled the spinnaker the entire way.
The race start was 9:30am and we finished at 5:27pm, not bad. We had 10-15 with the occasional 20 puff early in the day before the breeze gradually died off during the day to around the 10kt mark. Which all in all made for very pleasant sailing day with a little bit of excitement thrown in here and there.
The two big events for the day were a round up with the kite and a complete knock down mast tip in the water. This was totally our fault there was only mid-teen wind pressure, we just tried to hold our monster black kite through a very very shy part of the course and it didn't pay off. So we got the kite off, Nathan jumped on the keel/centerboard to help us up and discovered a huge palm frond wrapped around the keel which he obviously discarded.
We had some great kite rides soon after these events when we put up our fractional green kite and did some shy kite running to get through some of the narrower channel areas and just kept blasting along when the breeze allowed, while we hiked out like Laser sailors.
Hopefully someone got some photos of us, we didn't take our camera for the first time ever. We just plain out forgot to grab it with everything else we had to do to get ready for the race, which is a bugger because there were so many great people around us that we had good laughs with as we raced. This was also a pleasant change from previous years, to be in amongst other boats that we couldn't previously get anywhere near speed wise and also to have a great social race where in other years we were amongst less social and more 'serious' racers, read; boring even when we were going fast.
Right, so the results are in and we did extremely well considering our mast testing early in the race. We knew we were chasing down the competition very very well in the last quarter of the race and were passing a few boats but to finish in the top 10 of a 20 boat fleet after our swims and multiple kite changes was a surprise.
Initially at the presentation we were actually named as the winner of Division 2, after a quick check of the finish times after the presentation I noticed right away that they had our finish time as a full hour ahead of our actual finish time. So a quiet word with the club and a hand back of the winners prize and I was feeling much better. We ended up with 5th on handicap which we were very happy with.
So on paper at the moment our next race is the Pearl Challenge on 21 February. That's another 50+nm race that will involve windward and leeward sailing and I would not expect to finish in anything less than 12hours. I am currently debating with myself whether to do it or not, we are already entered, but I would like to modify our bow to get to 20ft and not our current 16ft or so waterline. We will (I will) have to decide this week I reckon.
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