Bravo!
Imagine what you'll get out of the boat once you've got a full
season or two of learning how to fine-tune the air flow over the
sails...
Combined with a taller and/or more efficient rig, you should be
able to up your performance another notch or two. Getting the sails
cut "just so" could be as important as how you tune them, and
sometimes it takes sailmaker two or three tries tor really dial in a
new design. Of course, computer-cut sails modeled with an airflow
program are a huge step up from a good guess, but even these
sometimes require adjustments.
- Mike
Herb wrote:
Dear All,
This weekend was much more successful. My sailing instructor came out it us for a while on Sat and sorted us out - we had several shunts in the 90 - 100 degree region. I think the problem was just my incompetence and light winds. We had more wind this weekend - not much (no whitecaps) but enough to sail. No GPS tracks as the batteries died.
Sailing by the lee works very well - it was necessary as one of the rudders broke at the tiller attachment Sat. morning.
Sat. night we went to Koh Lan and nearly ran into a boom (i.e, a bunch of buoys in a line linked by chain, not sure what these are called) in the dark and sailed backwards to avoid it. We were so close there was no time to shunt and to close for tacking to work. We were maybe 5 meters from it. Don't really remember how we did it, but it worked well.
We beached (intentionally) twice. The first time was about twice as fast as it should be. The second time was perfect.
Still have more to learn, especially about how to shunt quickly, but it clearly works well now.
Will consider what to do with the rudders and rig. Am leaning to a Wharram unarig and am open to suggestions on the rudders. She makes 10 -15 degrees leeway with the jib up and about 1/2 that without the jib. Given the inconvenience of the jib when shunting and the difficulty of seeing around it I am inclined to go with a unarig. Leeway is probably just mismatch between clr and Coe, but am not sure how to fix it.
Thank you all for your help.
Best regards