More frustration than fun

That's how the day felt.  I spent Saturday afternoon preparing the boat and in particular the mast.  I went about putting some prebend in the mast but subsequently ended up putting a huge amount of fullness in the sail as the mainsail luff and mast bend were totally different.  The sail luff was setting alongside the mast rather than behind it.
Sunday I set off at 06.30 and arrived at Yeovil 140 miles and 2.5hrs later, met Doug and George from Bideford, had a quick chat then launched the Lintel for a quick tune prior to racing.  She wasn't going at all well in fact it took four hours until I managed a reasonable result!  Too much weather helm and nowhere near enough boatspeed.  I heeded the advice of some of the competitors and whilst the Lintels performance slowly improved my helmming didn't. Three times I made contact with other competitors so places were just frittered away and yet worse was still to come.  During the start sequence of race 15 another competitor just reached straight into me whilst on Port tack. The force was enough to pull the shroud out of the mast and although I took a spare IOM just in case the OOD refused to let me enter the two remaining races with it.  I thought this was a bit unfair especially as earlier in the day we all had to wait over 20 mins whilst the OOD postponed the racing so he and another competitor could retrieved and subsequently fix a boat following a battery switch fault.  Jeez, it wasn't as if I had any chance of doing any better than twelfth or in this case, last.  So even though I had a working boat I left early for my long trip back home.


The photo above shows some Pre race tuning. The original course was a bit confusing and consisted of two opposite triangles.  After a few complaints the course was changed and later on shortened to two Port triangles.  In the foreground is the starboard end Start mark and in the middle of the picture is the Windward mark.