Hi Celeste,
A couple pieces of advice. You need to get your motor up higher. Having it drag in the water is real slow. Last time I saw you sail, it was raised, but still dragging and spinning the propeller. Think about how much slower you go dragging a hand or foot in the water. There is no silver bullet that you can tweak on your boat that'll fix 10 minutes behind. Tuning and tweaking to the rig, are 10ths of a knot. That equates to maybe 30 seconds over a race GO fleet length race. If you'd like my advice, IF there's something wrong with the boat, it's likely drag related. Dragging the motor, slime on the bottom, kelp on the keel or rudder.... something like that. That's the only thing that can slow a boat THAT much. After that, it's likely steering angle up wind. I'd look at how high you're able to sail. Figure out what full trim is for your boat, and once it's trimmed perfectly, hyper focus on the telltales and steer to them. Steer down when the windward telltales goes up, steer up when the leeward one goes up. The sail has to be trimmed perfectly for that to work, but you may just be off the wind. I find a lot of people don't sail as high as they can and that's extra distance covered which adds a lot of time to the race. (unless you're in a footing mode in which case it's a couple degrees down and increased speed might be tactically what you need at that moment.) Most new people however sail WAY low which is a quick way to pick up time and improve. After that, is likely the team work in tacks. Getting the boat to turn in a smooth arch, not oversteering, and having the sail trim for both sails match the turn. That's all about minimizing the speed lost through the turn. Your boat's heavy. You got to keep it moving because if it stalls, it's hard to get back up to speed and takes a long time to accelerate. As skipper, it's easy to blame the crew for that, and not getting the jib/genoa in fast enough, but in truth, I've seen more times where it's the skipper under turning the boat and getting stuck in irons for a moment, or just not working with the crew to keep the boat moving. It's discouraging to be that far behind, but... fortunately, there are things that you can do to see huge increases and all it takes is time on the tiller (and getting the boat bottom/blades clean, and the motor out of the water.)
Hope that helps.
Paul
Hi William, Thank You for your input!
All I know is, the fleet walks away from us. I've tuned and re-tuned. I'm making adjustments on course to cars for headsail along with other tweeks.
Looking at the calculated race results, we are consistently 10 minutes behind you..
I know I could be doing better... with a different boat, Ha! ...but I shall not give up trying to improve our time. Cleaner tacks will help that.
-- Paul Owens
Star 8471 (Sneaky Duck..)
