Swiftsure

Swiftsure was interesting.
We started out with very light wind and again, after a reasonably good start we clawed our way toward Race Rocks. Things were going quite well until we tried to pass our friends on Alchemy. We ended up in the "gas" from their sails and lost momentum -- ouch. We weren't able to recover and started slipping slowly back.
To compound difficulties, we were of course sailing against a flood tide so the net result was that we sailed as hard as we could just to stay still. Slowly the wind built and we were finally able to sail through the Race without much difficulty.
The wind continued to build as we sailed up the Canadian shore with a fair number of the fleet. By the time we got to Sheringham the wind had built to 30kts and we decided to cross over.
The wind stayed in the 20s as we crossed but started to drop as we closed on the US shore -- in retrospect crossing over too early was probably error #2.
Error #3 was clearly when we missed the big wind shift that took us back out into the Strait rather than tacking -- we were worried that there was no wind on the shore.
After rounding at around 2:15 we started the homeward leg still in the very light wind trying various sail combinations in an effort to just get Turicum moving. As is the usual case as the morning came with it came the wind.
We ended up having a great sail home to what looked like a 3rd place finish. Unfortunately another boat finishing behind us corrected over us dropping us to 4th.
All in all we finished in the top 3rd of the race and we were generally pleased with what we had accomplished.
A video clip can be seen at http://gallery.me.com/jamesdoane#100449

Next stop Van Isle

Swiftsure

Well, sitting with a bunch of other skippers trying to figure out what the heck the wind is going to do.
The range of wind speed is very wide -- 10kts to 30kts and picking what sail combination to use is going to be critical. If the worst happens and the wind speed keeps swinging up and down, our fordeck crew is going to get worn out from the sail changes.
We are currently carring 5 headsails and I am trying to decide if we should keep a 6th aboard.
I will definately be catching the weather briefing today -- they have David Jones of Enviroment Canada and he is The Best.
Just to add to festivities, we have Andrew, Ross, and Erv on their boat right beside us. We are going to have a blast racing against some of our old crew.

More later.

May update

The time from Straits until now - the long weekend - has been a blur.
May 7 was Sailpast, May 11 Turicum out of the water, May 12 June's birthday, May 19 back into the water, and now the long weekend to get things tidied up and ready for Swiftsure.
Our new #2 looks good -- awfully big but quite flat so we can twist if off in the gusts and power up in the lulls.
Hopefully we can get the new wind instrument installed this weekend so that we can finally get some correct wind information.

Next weekend is Swiftsure -- I don't see a link to their race tracker but they sould have one up this week. Go to http://www.swiftsure.org/ and there will be a link to the tracker.

Sothern Straits review

Southern Straits was the proverbial best of times and the worst of times.
We stared out by separating from the fleet in the light air when we stayed out too long rather than heading right for the shore breeze.
When we finally managed to round Ballenas, things picked up dramatically. Through the remaining legs of the race we were able to pass a number of boats and made up 20 - 30 min. on the majority of the fleet.
Unfortunately, we weren't able to make up the 2 hours lost on the first leg.

One of the biggest pluses was the way we were able to get Turicum moving in the very light wind. We were able to use the conditions to learn a lot. Hopefully, we will be able to use this new knowledge in Swiftsure and Van Isle.

Southern Straits

Southern Straits here we come!
After a pretty busy week Turicum is ready to go for Straits.
We will have a mixed crew with several vets and a few rookies. The progress of the race can be followed on http://tracker.southernstraits.ca/ and with any luck I should be able to send in some reports from the race course.

For the last several days the weather forecasts have been for very light wind but things seem to be improving. It looks like a High pressure system is going to pass right over the course and produce some very fickle wind.

It's going to be interesting.

Safety at Sea

Wow! Still winding down after a very intensive week preparing for and being part of presenting BC's first Safety at Sea course.

A fantastic experience working with an outstanding group of very high level sailors. I think we convinced people that PFDs are very good things to have on all the time as well as it is worth while to take time to plan for situations in advance rather than just react.

Particularly after the pool sessions with everyone swimming around in full gear, there were lots of grins. Fantastic to see how quickly groups worked as high functioning teams to solve problems and help fellow team members.

You can see that on Turicum everyone has a PFD and we even have the rookie on a safety harness.

While it took a bit of work to put the course together -- mostly done by David Sutcliffe -- I found it a great learning experience talking with other sailors, sharing their experiences and getting ideas from them how we can do things better on Turicum.

One of the things that made me very happy was to see a bunch of people buy into the idea of wearing PFDs al the time.

Van Isle!

We are now starting to ramp up for Van Isle.
This year we will be doing the Van Isle 360 race and following that with a Van Isle cruise.

We have our 360 Race crew together and have had some practices. We have more practices scheduled and then it will be off to Straits and Swiftsure for our Final tune-ups.
Our next practice will be April 9/10 and the big step will be using our Spinnakers -- hopefully we can get some photos.

For both the race and cruise we will be using SPOT to provide ongoing course track and try to provide a daily blog with photos.
Van Isle 360 site --- http://www.vanisle360.com/

Only 2 places left on our July cruise --- http://www.vanisle360.com/

Cheers