On deflating kites and the relative strengths of FW and slalom gear

The Lord of the Wind Showdown in Los Barrilles (Baja) got some pretty intense coverage. Lots going on, tons of good racing and freestyle/big air for both boards and kites. And, of course, a bit of friendly rivalry. David Wells of Waterhound summed it up as KP deflating the kites in the headline for his daily news digest (to which you should absolutely subscribe - it's a rather excellent daily dose of water-sports related news). Here's his write-up on it, and KP has a good report up as well.

The thing I find remarkable about this is that everyone seemed to be surprised that Kevin was able to hold off the kites downwind, whereas nobody really commented on the feat he pulled off in getting out from under them after the start and beating them to the windward mark. That held true both for the comments you heard from folks who were at the event, and on the local Pacific Northwest windsurfing newsgroup.

Conventional wisdom has it that kites suck upwind, but rock on a free downwind leg, going deeper and faster than anything else. But all last year, the kite racers have made tremendous strides in upwind performance. They've come to the point where in racing with the Bay Area formula fleet (probably the strongest amateur fleet you'll find in the US), they've proven that they can make it to the windward mark with the lead pack. Sure, they tend to foot compared to formula sailors, but with the edge they have in speed, they still put up very respectable VMG.

And it's been proven again and again that unless conditions are absolutely ballistic, FW beats big slalom gear going up - even modern big slalom gear. So you have some of the world's best kite racers on the most up to date gear. And then you have Kevin, who's easily their equal on the windsurfing side. He's riding a big slalom board and an 8.5 Ezzy Infinity. No disrespect to Dave Ezzy - but that sail is not really known as a course slalom upwind powerhouse. And still, Kevin pulls out from under the kiters after the start and beats them to the windward mark - that's an impressive performance, both for the rider and for the gear; it's amazing how versatile big slalom gear has become.

And then there's the downwind, and everyone seems to expect a massacre - but it doesn't happen. Kevin stays in front. Impossible, is it not? Except it isn't. Something funny happened in kite evolution in the last few years. Racing kite boards have become very wide with very fat tails, and they run very big fins - a trend similar to the evolution of formula boards. And downwind is all of a sudden a bit harder - I had several kiteracers tell me that in rough water, going downwind can be pretty character building. Yes, they are still way faster off the breeze than FW - but that's where another interesting thing has happened.

Big slalom gear has become an amazing downwind weapon - not just downwind as in downwind slalom (somewhat broad reaches), but downwind as in deep and fast on a free downwind leg. We've seen this in the Blowout, where Bruce started going out on his 8.2 and big slalom board three years ago. On the top half of the course, I was able to stay with him, even pull ahead once in a while on my 9.9 and FW board. In the corridor, when the breeze picked up a couple notches, it wasn't even close - he went just as deep as I did, but way faster.

I've tested this since then with others - and when you're fully powered on a big slalom board, and the water is somewhat rough, not only are you more comfortable than your buddy on FW - you're also making your way downwind a lot faster.

This all leads me to thinking about the SF Classic. That race has a couple small triangles on the top of the course, usually in lots of breeze under the bridge (with a weak spot on the inside mark where everyone is slogging for a bit). Then there's lots of broad and beam reaching all the way down to Berkeley. If you didn't care about placing well in the upwind Challenge that starts as a time trial with your finish in the Classic, if it was pretty windy, and if there were a big ebb helping you out with the upwind legs under the bridge, that race just might call out for big slalom gear. It would certainly be worth the experiment - and it would be a hoot as well, since all that reaching across the bay would actually be fun instead of being strictly character building. If I get a chance to come down for that this year and the conditions are right, I might just try that...

Wonder what the guy at the rental counter would have said...

You know it's regatta time when heavily overloaded rental cars start showing up at Crissy Field. Roof racks? We don't need no steeenkin' roof racks!

Got to SF yesterday, met up with the rest of the Gorge Cup fleet today. Good showing - five juniors (Fiona, Alyson, Ben, Jay, Alex), MacRae, Tavis. Bunch of Gorge freestylers down here for the Nationals as well; some of them might even do slalom. Went out today for a few runs with MacRae, Fiona and Alyson to shake out the legs. The girls were doing great despite the gusty/flukey conditions (the fog was well inside the bay today).

The fleet is pretty stacked with visiting rock stars and hot local sailors. Looks like at least 50 sailors. Racing starts tomorrow; Waterhound should be the best bet for good coverage.

Object lesson on barging - Any questions?

Check out this screenshot from a video taken by Jean Rathle. Then scroll down to the video. Watch from about 2 minutes in and witness Steve B. taking out Al M. Steve was definitely barging here (pretty common thing in formula fleets). You'll notice that in his race report, Steve doesn't really dwell on things here - he clearly recognized he fouled Al (which is why he did his circles), and because it took him a while to sort things out after the yardsale, he had a crappy race.

Not to pick on Steve here; he's a seasoned racer, and he tried to walk that fine line between not running into people and not being over early. I'm sure he would have pushed up (and taken the OCS) rather than crash - if he could have. But it looks like he either didn't see Al, or things were happening too fast for him to process and react. Same with Al - it's pretty clear that even though he's looking up, Steve was in his blind spot and caught him completely by surprise, so he never had a chance to take evasive action, and while he apparently had a remarkable recovery to take second in that race (way to go, Al), I'm sure he realizes how lucky he was that nothing more serious happened.

I said above that barging is pretty common in formula fleets. It's also a pretty risky strategy - if you're coming down the line at speed, fully lit with the fin loaded up, you have limited ability to take evasive action. So if someone pushes you up, you often can't go below and around them, and you end up going over early instead. If things go wrong in your evasive action, you're now forcing the other guy (who has the right of way) to take evasive action and mess up his start. Or you crash, which is really slow under the best of circumstances, or could get someone hurt if you're not so lucky.

For slower fleets (keel boats, slower dinghies), barging almost never works - you can pretty much rely on someone to come up below you and push you hard, and in competitive fleets, bargers will get pushed into premature starts almost every time. In formula, that's a bit different - there's a serious risk in pushing a barger up, and as Rob Hartman used to point out, swimming is indeed the slowest point of sail, and who wants to get hurt or get their gear smashed up and sit out the rest of the regatta?

That has led to barging being ubiquitous in formula racing - especially in local races (big, aggressive fleets at major events tend to close the door at the boat, so bargers usually don't even get a chance to run down the line - they end up peeling off to avoid getting pushed into the committee boat). And sometimes, that can lead to a situation where if you set up for a proper start, you end up getting screwed in the process - so even seasoned racers might choose to be part of the happy parade of bargers zooming down the line at speed.

Just remember that when you're barging, you're taking a pretty significant amount of risk. S&*t will happen sooner or later when you barge, and if it does, you had better be prepared to bail. Don't count on the people below you to just acquiesce and be cowed - sometimes, they'll push back. I don't have a problem with racers taking risk, as long as it's reasonable given their skill and the conditions (Steve B., for example, can usually be counted on to be in control, so I wouldn't hesitate to push up on him a little - if that makes him OCS, tough luck, and I'm sure he wouldn't complain about it).

Just as long as we all remember that at the speeds we're going, and given all the pointy/sharp/hard bits on our gear, cutting it too close can have some pretty nasty consequences. It's not a contact sport, after all.

Off to do some racing

After light Easterlies last weekend led to cancellation of our season opener, it looks like we might have better luck today. This morning, there are bright skies and a good breeze in Hood River, and the forecast looks promising - perhaps even slalom potential. Should be a good time!

Battle at sea...

The St. Francis Yacht Club and the hardy racers of the Bay Area fleet never cancel racing. It just doesn't happen. At the 07 Nationals, we raced the final two heats in conditions that caused the race director to issue stern warnings to people, as well as send competitors in against their will when they were floundering at the start line. But they don't cancel racing.

Make that they very rarely cancel racing. Last night's Friday night race didn't happen. It was blowing somewhere around 30, with a vicious ebb throwing up some pretty big voodoo chop, and when John Craig (said race director) asked the assembled (and fully rigged) crowed of racers whether they wanted to race in this, only one hand (Jean's) went half-way up.

Instead, I got to test just what the upper limit of my Exo 71 is. The board did remarkably well in overpowered 6.0 with a  34 (a 36 would have made for better jibes - that is a pretty wide tail on that board, after all). With that much range, Exocet isn't doing itself any favors - people just won't be going out and buying multiple boards if each of them has that much range. Good for the consumer, I guess (and so, in the long run, good for Exocet). Lots of fun was had as most of the guys took out their slalom or freeride stuff. Much tailwalking and hilarity ensued, along with white-knuckle maching reaches through the troughs (usually ended by some stray piece of chope throwing up a ramp where there hadn't been one a second before - gotta love Crissy on an ebb...)

The pictures don't do the day justice, as it was pretty tame on the inside 200 yards or so, which pretty much exhausts the effective range of my little camera.  For a reality check - David Wells (blue Aerotech) was on a 5.7 and an 84l freeride board; Jean (red Aerotech) was on a 5.0 and a 78l wave board. It was windy...

Today's CalCup will be in Berkely - lots of wind expected for that. After that, it's time to drive home.

Racing - the ultimate zen exercise (yeah, right)

This is the wind graph for Saturday's Cog & Leaf Gorge Cup. We had a pretty decent forecast (15-21 in the afternoon), a sponsor (Sailworks - the cog part of the equation, and Roberts, hence the leaf), awesome trophies (commissioned by Bruce and created by MacRae, who is a metal working wizard and whose steel art is pretty cool), as well as arrangements for post-racing dinner (Mexican).

And a little after 3, the breeze came up. We all got on the water and checked out the course (same as last time, except the marks were more in a straight line, which would open up all kinds of tactical options downwind). Unfortunately, it died (with a vengeance) before we could even get a sequence started. As the day wore on and the wind continued to no-show, Bruce joked that the minute the first burrito was broken into that night, the breeze would come up.

Sure enough, at about 5:30 or so, with reports of no breeze anywhere within a 100-mile radius and completely flat pressure gradients, the race was called, sailors derigged and loaded their gear, Amy arrived with the food (yeah!), beers were cracked open - and the water started to show some texture. Darren and Scotia were game to run fun races as long as wind and light held out (thanks!), so a bunch of us got on the water (properly fortified with excellent Mexican food) to run fun races (since the event had been called, these couldn't count - so those excellent trophies are still waiting for a good use).

We got to run two quick heats before the wind got too streaky. On the first start, I started starboard with just a few others as most of the fleet expected the usual port favor and just wanted to get into the still-fast river current to take them upwind. I decided against that at the last second because of the northerly slant to the breeze on the Washington side and the big hole near shore (right around where you'd tack before hitting the eddy-line - the big current masked that hole, and I just sort of discovered it sailing around before the start). This worked out great, as the port starters, after clearing us, got knocked like crazy. I made it to the windward mark in first by quite a margin because of that and held on to it. With the streaky conditions, I was glad for my 10.8 and the big Finworks LT; not sure how Bruce managed to get his 9.1 around the course and get second- he must have some sort of anti-gravity device to get- that, or he really worked it, as he sat out the next one and let one of the juniors use his rig.

Second heat was different, as the breeze started filling in at the south end - so it was back to port starts. I ran the line for a bit to get away from the pack and have a nice pocket to leeward to accelerate, then came up over the line about 1/3 of the way in (Nikoka, on the RSX, was kind enough to keep the rather eager pack stacked above/behind her from spilling onto the line, so I got a clear lane). The first few Starboard starters, led by MacRae, cleared me easily, but when they tacked, the current and better breeze in the middle had already given me enough of a lift to where they were lining up with my wake. Jay got second, followed by (I believe) Mac Rae. And then it was time to finally bag it for the day.

As I talked to my 8-year-old on the phone while derigging the first time, her comment was that "it just wan't meant to be." Great perspective, I guess. I'm glad we got our little spurt of fun-racing in at the end, as that made me feel a little better about the total of 11 hours spent in the car that day. Hopefully, over the course of the season, the driving/sailing time ratio will improve a bit. Considering that the PWA guys all flew to Korea for a big slalom event and got completely skunked for a whole week with not a single result, this just goes to show that this sport will teach you some form of zen - whether you want it to or not.

Gorge Cup DQ Dip'n'Dash

My first Gorge Cup for this season, the Dairy Queen Dip 'n' Dash took place May 31 at the Event Site. Derek Nielsen lined up Dairy Queen as a title sponsor for the event (way to go, Derek!), and he got to choose the course accordingly. On the left you can see what he came up with (according to Derek, that happened in the wee hours of the morning...).

It was a quick course, and I'd think the most apt description would be FW slalom - our regular upwind to mark A just off Well's Island, followed by a quick sprint around marks B, C, the start pin, and a reach to the finish - 4 jibes in all. Conditions were typical early season Gorge - pretty brisk breeze (especially up high near the windward mark - we could have easily raced slalom on 6.0's up there), and quite a few holes down low (which made any thoughts of actually switching to slalom a moot point). The current out in the channel was ripping, which together with the strong breeze and monster gusts made for really lumpy water up there (following Bruce around the windward mark in the first race was the first time ever I detected a hint of hesitation in his jibing; mind you, that was a "hint of hesitation" compared to the rest of us, who were flailing quite a bit). On the inside, there was quite a bit of back eddy, resulting in really smooth water.

Tactics were pretty straightforward - start on port, get into the current as quickly as possible, and then switch into slalom mode. At no point was I really pushing for downwind angle (even the broadest legs were not "free" in that way), so downwind tactics were what you would do in a slalom race - how to pass/cover on straights and in mark roundings (which, when traveling at mach speed on OP'd formula gear, can be extremely interesting). The rough conditions put a premium on board and sail handling and smooth transitions; the big current and shifty (both up and down and oscillating) winds made reading the layline at the top challenging.

Most racers were on 9's; I used my trusty 9.9 (since I chose not to have a 9 this season - hmm, maybe I need to reconsider that...), which resulted in serious handling challenges at the top.

Derek stepped up and performed great, being one with the course he had specified - he clinched second overall for the day behind Bruce (all bullets except race 7, which he sat out) and ahead of me by 1.3 points. I found that upwind in the smooth stuff, I was very much competitive on angle and speed, but that I hadn't nailed it in the lumpy stuff (I was losing angle on Bruce there). I also made a couple of errors on laylines - one such error ended up being rather costly - in the 7th and final heat, I thought I had the windward mark but missed it narrowly; the raging current moved me past it on the wrong side, so I had to sail a big circle around it. All that maneuvering in big overpowering gusts and large irregular chop and swell caused me to flounder badly for quite a while, losing 4 places in the process - very annoying. In hindsight, I should have been more conservative on calling my layline, or just given up on pushing for it a little earlier and just let the current take me up on the proper side of it (it's hard to beat around 5 knots of true VMG provided courtesy of the river with a couple extra tacks); but that just didn't compute in my at that point somewhat addled brain (wrestling the big sail around for seven heats had clearly taken its toll on my mental acuity).

Results at the VMG Events website - another well-organized race, a fun bbq afterwards, and a good time had by all. One thing this day made clear is why Formula sailing works so well for making sure you get a good event. Sure, at the windward mark, conditions were beyond what's reasonable for formula racing - but it wasn't dangerous, just suboptimal. And as a result, we had a full day's racing. We could have run slalom - and had a truly mediocre day's racing due to the large holes at the bottom of the course. It would have been no less challenging - but the stories told afterwards wouldn't have been epic tales of survival at sea (excuse the hyperbole) but lots of grumbling about not being able to plane through the holes at the lowest jibe mark. I'll take holding on over that any day ;)

Twisted

Check out these two pictures (courtesy Emmett MacDonald) - same sail, same amount of downhaul, taken within 3 minutes of each other at the Friday Night race in San Francisco in April.

The obvious difference is that one of them is upwind, with the outhaul fairly tight, and the other is downwind, with the outhaul cracked off a bit, going deep. These two pictures tell the story as to why today's formula sails are so insanely rangey - upwind, there's good drive, w/o the leach going all soft and soggy; downwind, if you get hit with a gust or the board hits a wave and decelerates a bit, there's enough twist to prevent you from being pitched over the handlebars when the leach catches.

Earlier generations of big race sails were huge advances for their time - but there was a lot less range, and twist was a lot less refined. When I started racing in 99, the big sails could be tuned with low downhaul tension, resulting in great performance upwind but a scary ride off the breeze. Or they could be tuned with enough downhaul tension for the leech not to catch off the breeze, which resulted in great speed all around but horrible angle upwind.

Mind you, that night I was on a 9.9 when, reasonably, a 9.0 would have been much faster and more appropriate for all racers on the course except Big Ben Bamer (who later also confessed to his 10 feeling a little big at times...). With all that range, I can realistically get a away with a two-sail formula quiver. My 10.8 is powerful enough for racing in what, for West Coast standards, is stupid light air, while my 9.9 is raceable even when it starts blowing like stink. Sure, there are tradeoffs (I didn't much care for the lower upwind angle the bigger sail forces on you in survival conditions at this particular Friday night race, or in the last two heats of last year's Nationals) - but unless you race in the Bay Area a lot, it's hard to justify a 9.0 anymore, and unless you race in Florida or Europe, the same holds true for a 12. Guess it's time to buy Bruce a beer this weekend when I go down for the Gorge Cup.

Crissy Friday Night Racing

At the end of my week in the Bay Area, I got to do the Friday night race at the St. Francis Yacht Club. If you've never done one of these - they're something special. The St. Francis is a rather well-appointed, big-time racing yacht club, but throughout the season, they let in both kiters (who have a Thursday night series) and windsurfers. I believe one of the reasons there's so much depth in the SF Bay Area fleet is that they get to race every other week. Note that half of the top ten formula racers at the 07 Nationals were racing on Friday.

The logistics on these events are pretty smooth - show up, pay your $15 drop-in fee, race. Start/finish is run from the deck of the St. Francis around stationary marks, and they run something like 5 quick WW/LW courses (sometimes with jibes required right off the deck to entertain the RC) in about an hour. The whole thing is then capped off with being able to use the club's facilities (showers and sauna - always welcome after a cold evening on the bay) and dinner in the grill room.

It had been a while since I'd raced one of these, and it was windy - the locals were all on 9.0's (except Ben Bamer, who at 230+ used a 10). Since I don't have anything smaller than my 9.9, I had to go down a fin size to my 68 to keep any semblance of control (it got a little wild at times...). Jay, by the way, decided to run his 7.2 slalom sail on his formula board since he, too, didn't have a 9.0 - this from the guy Pepi used to call "the Manimal", so it's safe to say it was windy... Several times, I had the whole board out of the water, holding on for dear life, and I was counting my blessings at the end of the night for only bobbled one jibe and having dropped my sail once.

The combo of a too-big sail with a too-small fin had the expected effect - I was going pretty fast, but couldn't point all that well. For the Friday night races, there's a big premium on getting an inside lane on port (everyone starts on port due to the geometry of the line) due to the lift on shore; footing off for speed is costly. I managed to compound that with being less-than-brilliant in my pre-start maneuvering (there's a lot of current there, and a lot of sailors milling about, and I was trying hard not to hit anyone).

I managed to pull out a fourth overall - mostly because of really good speed upwind (enough to make up my pointing deficit), pretty reasonable tacks, decent tactics, and pretty solid downwind performance (good speed and angle, and I managed not to blow up and take aggressive lines in several jibing duels). Overall, it was great fun and good racing. Of the three guys who beat me, two had done so in last year's Nationals (Seth had been 1st and Eric 3rd), and I managed to beat Ben and Al , who had both beaten me in the Nats (they placed 5th and 7th then, respectively) - so I'm pretty happy with where I am this early in the season.

Full results at the CalCup site (I was driving back home the next day when the locals were duking it out in their first CalCup of the year). Thanks to the St. Francis for hosting, the locals for being welcoming and competitive, and those who volunteered for RC duty (which surely had nothing to do with them wanting to sit out a windy one this early in the season, right?).

Glimpse the future of windsurfing competition

Dave White's Driven by Wind event is on in England. Big names, putting up big speeds in (so far) conditions that are well below what's to be expected from this place. Remember, this is where Martin van Meurs already broke 50 knots for short bursts (on a suboptimal day), so there's huge potential here.

I've been stoked about what these guys are doing for competition; while I'm of a racer than a speedsailor, it's exciting to me how events like this, and the awesome success of the gps grassroots racing movement, have revived interest in going fast despite the industry and press drumbeat over the past decade or so (you know all that drivel about anything to do with competition or going fast being uncool and devoid of 'soul'... - different issue, though.)

What gets me really excited about this one, though, is not so much that there's a record attempt at a great venue, with official WSSRC observation (and thus the potential for a new all-out record and an official 500m run over 50 knots). Don't get me wrong, that's really cool, and it adds yet another opportunity to what's happening at the canal in France.

No, the really sweet thing about all this is that Dave has gone out and done what I've been dreaming about for years - he's put a real-time display on the web. Virtual spectator-type technology has been available for a while now; it's made America's Cup coverage interesting to the average person (that is anyone not immersed in sailboat racing) by showing clearly what's happening on a course. In this particular case the appeal is more about immediacy (after all, we don't really care which of these guys is where on the course, we just want to know how fast they're going). But the fact that this event, without million-dollar budgets, has been able to put this together is (besides being a huge credit to Dave and his buddies) proof that the technology has come down to a price-point that makes it feasible for mainstream use.

Imagine real-time gps tracks, along with real-time footage from helmet/boom cams, all packaged together with footage from start/chase boat cams. We've talked about it for years; we're finally at the point where it should be feasible to put it together for real events, then use it (a) to present to crowds on the beach (think big events in Europe where people actually show up to watch even if they're not married to any of the competitors) and (b) to put together a package for channels like OLN or Discovery or ESPN. Can you imagine what that would do to make it clear to people just how exciting racing sailboards (even course racing, which is notoriously hard to follow for spectators) can be? Remember - this kind of presentation made the America's Cup exciting to watch - and those guys go what, 8 knots?

Good times!

2007 season - lessons and goals

I've been wanting to do a debrief for a while now, and the more I mull over the season, the more I realize that there's really no over-riding grand unifying theory - instead, there's a number of things that I've learned this year (or that have been reinforced in some way - sometimes it takes a while for those lessons to really sink in...) So here goes, in no particular order:

Physical Fitness
I'm in pretty good shape compared to the rest of the fleet - both in the Gorge and at Nationals. The difference is that, since I live in a place that doesn't allow for almost daily sailing, I don't get to build up that windsurfing-specific stamina. Whether it's the last two heats of the 10-round slalom marathon on the second day of the 3-day Gorge Challenge, or the last day of the Nationals when I was reduced to hanging on as my early season decision not to get a formula sail smaller than 9.9 collided with a solid 35 knots and voodoo chop on the course and my cumulative fatigue from the previous four days' racing - multi-day events just got the better of me this season. While there's not full substitute for time on the water (as windsurfing tends to be the best training for windsurfing - duh!) I've started aggressively working on my conditioning. I've been taking very careful notes of what's been aching to the point of immobility, and I'm adjusting my workouts to better target those things. Hopefully, that will bear some fruit next season.


Course Racing - VMG
The Gorge is a bit of an interesting place. Because we're racing with a reasonably small fleet and with long start lines, and because the water tends to be pretty smooth considering how windy it is, this opens a unique opportunity. You can, if you have enough board speed, get away with a super low-drag on-the-edge kind of tuning. For me, that meant my Roberts (with a relatively narrow tail) and very forward-raked R16's in Medium stiffness. That setup is way fast off the breeze, and upwind all it requires for incredible angle AND good speed (what a deal...) is a little bit of room to light up the foils before pushing for angle. That worked great for me all season in the Gorge, as I was right on Bruce's tail. It wasn't until Chris Prior came down for the Gorge Challenge and, with really good angle, started reducing my tactical options (and in the process edged me out of second into third) that I got a bit of a warning that this setup might have serious drawbacks.

Going to Nationals, however, made that very clear in the very first two heats - I simply couldn't play the high-speed game there, as (a) the course layout favored tactical degrees of freedom from grinding and (b) the rough water didn't allow me to take advantage of my speed all the way (it's hard to really light up the foils when you're flying off Crissy voodoo chop). Switching to Finworks fins made a huge difference on day 2 when I got a 4th and a 3rd place finish.

So the goal for next season is to find a better balance that allows me more latitude in my tactics - find better angle off the line so I can create my spaces to accelerate when I need them and can close the door on others, while retaining my boat speed edge. The fins are a key piece in that; tuning the whole package is the other.


Slalom
Downwind slalom is dead simple; to win, all you have to do is:

1. Nail your starts EVERY TIME - hit the line at full speed at 0, on the advantaged end, staying clear of anyone who might be OCS and could give you bad air.
2. Have ample boat speed to avoid being rolled, easily roll others, and stay out in front where you have clean air and undisturbed water. Be able to preserve that speed even in the holes.
   
3. Hit the mark first; set your line for the jibe to prevent anyone from cutting in on you.
4. Accelerate out of the jibe faster than anyone else, even if there are holes.
   
5. Repeat 3 and 4 until you finish (in first).

Really, it's that easy ;) Of course, optimizing for these success factors can lead to competing priorities. Sure, you want raw speed and super-fast jibes - that suggests going with relatively small gear and low drag (as well as good control so you don't bounce out). But you also need to punch through the holes and accelerate out of your jibes if it's light - which suggests more power and bigger boards/fins. And for Gorge box slalom courses, a bit of upwind ability is needed as well, also suggesting bigger gear.

Looking at slalom events this year, both in the Gorge and at Nationals, I'm concluding that:

• I've gotten better at being aggressive on the starts; risking the occasional OCS, my starts have gotten more consistent, and I've started positioning myself a bit better. Gaining more experience has been helpful here.
• I've gotten more aggressive at fighting for position within the heats, too. While that did cause me to crash in a crucial heat in the final rounds in the Nationals, I still believe it's the way to go - being tentative, for me, has led to at least as many crashes as being aggressive; you can't race slalom defensively and expect any level of success.
• My jibes have gotten faster and more precise than they were in the past - I guess my slalom racing is finally catching up with my formula racing overall. The weak point is acceleration out of the jibe - the things for me to work on here are (a) getting a bigger board (and thus get better acceleration, as well as be more impervious to holes), and (b) working aggressively on my jibe exits (which is something I can do in the off-season when sailing slalom gear up here - you don't need a training partner to go through jibe drills, just a bunch of commitment and some breeze).
• I've gotten faster - which is probably a direct result of just forcing myself to keep the hammer down anytime I'm out on my slalom gear, no matter how sketchy it might get. As a side effect, that's resulted in great entertainment for those sailing around me when I'm training, as the Bellinghamsters keep wondering why I'm out there on way too much sail taking big spills every so often...

It's been a good season - can't wait to see what next year will bring!

Gorge Cup - season finale (sort of...)

So in my last post I made the mistake of looking forward to the racing we should have on Saturday based on the really strong forecast. Which, of course, was a grieveous error. On Friday, while I was in the car with my family driving to the Gorge, the forecast collapsed about as fast as the pressure gradients did, and we got to the Event Site to the remnants of what had been 5.0 conditions and had now turned into very marginal formula sailing at best. The forecast for Saturday, at this point, was calling for light Easterlies - which was roundly pooh-poohed by everyone at the beach. After all, how could the whole thing change so quickly. Surely, there'd be some breeze on Saturday.

And there was - the picture above shows the extent of the breeze we got during the window of opportunity we had for racing. The picture was taken by Carey Caronni off the jetty at the Event Site (thanks, Carey!) - so you can tell it's Easterly, and it's ripping ;)

Hope sure had a good time with this setup - this was the first time we tried towing her behind the long-board, and it made a big difference, as she could be independent but still feel safe, plus I could get her going, since it's hard for her to drive that big board with her 1.7. Thanks to Roger Jackson for the suggestion (I improvised the tether with four bungee uphauls daisy-chained together; I'm sure rope and regular bungee would have been lower in drag but this worked well). That was a lot of fun, as was the fact that the racers made the best of things as Scotia and Darren organized paddle and swim races and Scotia got a chicken bbq lunch delivered - so it was a nice day at the beach.

The wind did eventually pick up - right around 6 pm, and streaky, so we didn't miss much as we went off to the end of year awards ceremony and CGWA end of season party. Turns out that in overall standings for the season, I came in third behind Bruce Peterson and Doug Beaman. We only got 6 scores this year (we were unlucky in losing two races to the weather, and another two to equipment malfunctions related to the committee boat), so there was only one throwout, and I had missed two races (the Blowout and the August 18 race). Congrats to Doug - showing up is a pre-condition, and the vagaries of whether conditions will enable racing are certainly always part of the game.

I'm planning on doing a bit of a recap on the season in the next couple days. For now, I'd just like to say that I'm grateful to have such well-organized racing with such a competitive fleet here in the Northwest. Scotia is an organizational power house (as well as a saint to put up with us all). I've had a lot of fun racing in the Gorge this year, and I can't wait to do it all over again next season.

One more...

Labor Day weekend is upon us, and summer is almost over. One more race in the Gorge - if you were ever about the fence about racing, this would be a good weekend to come down, as the forecast is excellent for the whole weekend, and turnout is likely to be good with the long weekend, and the awards party on Saturday night.

Nationals Debrief - Slalom

And finally some notes on slalom. First off - we were lucky with the conditions, as they were pretty consistent for Crissy Field standards. I was able to be competitive for the whole series of races on a 24" Roberts with a 7.2 Sailworks NXsl. Others did switch around their gear a bit; I don't know if it's because their stuff isn't as rangy, or whether they just wanted to optimize; my setup felt right the whole time, though.

Usually, slalom starts are biased towards the pin a little bit; that's supposed to reduce congestion at the boat (as people would try to be above others and roll over them on the way to the first mark). Since the first leg was a bit of a tight reach (especially in the finals when the ebb had slacked and it was starting to flood a little), it seems like the best starts were to be had in the middle of the line (with a bit of upwind advantage over the people at the pin, but with enough distance to the boat to avoid its windshadow and to avoid being pushed up by leeward boards with right of way).

The second reach, however, was *very* deep. So taking the first mark high was not necessarily a winning strategy, especially at the beginning when it was pretty light and you couldn't really get enough power to really fly that deep off the breeze. In the finals series, the first mark was moved down a bit - which was very welcome because it (a) reduced the too-deep angle for the second reach and (b) made up for the flood making the first leg even more of a squeeze.

In the qualifying heats, I had no problems getting pretty good starts; in the finals, with more people pushing hard and 13 boards in the race, the rather short start line made starting a bit more precarious. Add to that the fact that at the first mark it was flooding a bit now, and you really didn't want to be stuck to leeward of the line, pinching to make the mark and getting rolled by those above you.

The course was pretty short; each heat took between 2 and 3 minutes for the leaders, and the reaches were too short to do a lot of passing. Good starts and aggressive jibes, as well as fast acceleration out of the jibes, were thus the critical success factors (more so than big time straight-line speed on the reaches). This favored lighter, nimble sailors (like David Wells and Jason Voss), as well as really solid and aggressive jibers like Bill Weir. Seth, while not exactly a fly-weight, is certainly nimble and aggressive, plus he tended to run bigger boards than most to optimize acceleration out of the jibes, and that certainly paid off for him.

Waterstate was interesting, too. In the qualifying series, the first mark was right at an eddy line, so there was a bit of cross chop right in the jibe zone. Add to that the disturbance in the water from the press boat maneuvering to stay just to windward of the mark, and you had some 'interesting' water to jibe in. The second and fourth marks had typical Crissy ebb chop, while the third jibe was in pretty smooth water. In the finals, the picture changed a bit with the tide changing over; the first mark was now pretty flat (plus speeds were lower as we were pinching a bit with the flood pushing us down), but the second mark was all of a sudden experiencing some really strange cross chop with an eddy line close by (I stuffed the nose of my board into that in the last heat when I was trying to squeeze by David Wells on the inside of the jibe, resulting in a tremendous wipeout for me).

With an OCS in the first finals heat, and a big wipeout in the last, there are certainly some lessons to be learned from this one. Given how I was set up, and how the course worked, however, I don't think I'd change anything about my approach. While I had great straight-line speed on just about anyone in the fleet, the short reaches didn't really afford me an opportunity to take full advantage of that. My jibe exits tend to be a little slower than those of lighter sailors (or sailors who ran bigger boards). That left starts and aggressive positioning in the jibes as the key factors, and I tried to maximize those. In that first heat, I hit the line 1 second prematurely - so it was a matter of relative positioning (as I had left myself not quite enough room to maneuver in this first heat with the top of the fleet), but the general approach of pushing hard at the start was certainly valid.

Similarly, I was able to hold off a number of lighter sailors in several heats by positioning my jibes to close the door on them, protecting my position, and was able to pick up several positions by attacking those in front of me who left the door open. The fact that in that last heat I crashed while attacking is the risk you take trying to win a heat as opposed to just placing.
While you could argue that sometimes you just have to be conservative to protect your position, I've found that when I try to jibe conservatively, it often results in being too tentative - which often leads if not to outright crashes than at least baubled jibes that allow others to pass.

One thing for me to change, however (other than continuing to work on my jibes) would be to go with a slightly larger slalom board. While this would marginally decrease straight line speed, it should do a lot for acceleration on jibe exit, as well as make me more impervious to holes and adverse current (very important for a heavier sailor).

Racing downwind slalom is a blast. While the heats are short, they're definitely intense. The round robin fleet format allowed everyone a fair amount of racing - definitely an improvement from double-eliminations, which tend to result in the majority of sailors being eliminated early and getting very little racing in. For downwind slalom to be fun, though, the conditions have to be right. We were lucky to get enough breeze to have fun, exciting races.

The pros race slalom on large gear in light air these days, as a way to guarantee a contest. While I get their motivation (it's much easier to sell a slalom contest to spectators and sponsors, since it's easy to follow what's going on and you don't have to worry about setting different courses when it's getting light), as a competitor, I'd have to say that the prospect of racing slalom in 12-14 knots is just not very exciting. Sure, you're still going pretty fast, but the raw adrenaline rush of 'real' slalom (i.e., high wind slalom in 20+ knots) is just not there. As a racer, you're then stuck with moderately exciting sailing, but without the tactical challenge you can have in course racing in those conditions.

I'm curious to see how this will develop at the amateur level; in the Gorge, we're all basically racing 2 boards and 4 sails, just like the pros - it's just that we distribute that over one Formula and one Slalom setup, as opposed to two sets of slalom gear, giving us more range and variety for only marginally more money (as the large slalom stuff isn't really that much cheaper than formula gear).

Nationals Debrief - Formula

Some notes on the course at the Nationals, and what that meant for tactics given the conditions on the different days. The diagram to the left roughly shows how things were laid out, with the course set off Crissy Field (the start line was just above the St. Francis, and the WW mark outside and upwind from Anita Rock). We ran the same configuration for all course races - Start, A to port, B to port, A to port, B to port, A to port, downwind finish; that's a LONG course - it took the leaders anywhere from 25 to 30 or so minutes per heat.

Generally, the outside (i.e., North side) of the course was favored going upwind; when it was ebbing, you got both the current and the extra breeze working in your favor; when it was flooding, you got the breeze outside, as well as a bit of a lift. Since that's a well-known bias at Crissy, PRO John Craig set the start with a fair bit of starboard bias and made it fairly short to discourage port starting. I did a few port starts, and had to pretty much duck the whole fleet, working to clear the boat end of the start line - it still was worth it for me, though, to get over to the right faster, and to get clear air (more on that later).

While the course was long, once you were around the first time, it wasn't super tactical. Going into shore on the upwind legs wasn't really an option, so it tended to be a parade. Usually, someone in the leader's group would get a good tight rounding at the bottom mark and grind like crazy, resulting in following sailors getting gassed, and the whole fleet getting knocked down by dirty air. As a result, the upwind legs created little opportunity for passing. Only on the ebb could you potentially foot below people and get them through raw speed; on the flood, you'd get knocked down too much. As further risk to footing, there was always the potential that you'd get too far into the shipping lane and would be made to tack by a chase boat to keep you out of the way of oncoming container ships.

Downwind presented a bit more of a tactical opportunity; you could either go for playing the inside in the hopes of a good header (since you often get southerly gusts off the shore), or you could go for more pressure on the outside. Both had their risks - you could find yourself stuck in light air near shore, or you could be forced to jibe prematurely outside to get out of the way of freighters.

The whole layout very much rewarded good angle, both upwind and down. Upwind, good angle gave you options, as you stayed clear of the obstructions (shore for the starboard starters; then the shipping lane as you were banging the corner outside). It further allowed you to sail more directly into the flood for those races where that was a factor, resulting in a more favorable composite vector. Downwind, it allowed you to take risks going inside; passing someone by rolling them was risky, as they could head you up into the light air and shallow water by the beach.

The current, of course, was a major issue. With a strong flood, laying the windward mark had a huge element of chance - if you hit a header or hole on approaching the mark, the ebb would convert what looked like a safe layline into tacking practice. And since the current wasn't uniform across the course (on a strong ebb, there's usually a bit of a flood eddie on the inside; near slack, you can find all kinds of strange currents), local knowledge payed off handsomely for the top Bay sailors who call this place home. I remembered some of the lessons learned many years ago when racing here regularly, but I also had to relearn some of them pretty painfully.

Lastly, the waterstate is a tremendous factor at this venue. Crissy Field is famous for its voodoo chop. On a strong ebb, you've got big, pitched swell (with cross-swell at the eddie lines) teaming up with the innumerable boat/ferry/freighter wakes and reverberation off the seawall down by the start. On a flood, you can have flat water and washboard chop, with sudden cross chop coming at you out of nowhere. Compared to the Gorge, for a given wind strength, that results in generally much rougher and less predictable water. As a result, it's much harder to keep your foils flying.

That was a lesson I learned the hard way on the first day of racing. I was comfortably powered on my 9.9 - in the Gorge, that translates into racing on a 68cm fin. I was on my 70, though, since I simply couldn't get enough power to point otherwise. So in the puffs, I got stood up by a too-lifty fin, and in the lulls (or when I couldn't keep things flowing b/c I was working through the voodoo chop) I'd lose the drive from the fin. On the second day, I switched from my R16 to a Finworks formula fin, and it made a huge difference; I got better angle without losing significant amounts of speed, and the fin just had more range and tracked better and more predicably - that was both a matter of the foil and the softer flex.

Ultimately, the critical success factors for the regatta were

• good angle (more so than good boat speed), which kept options open,
  
• conservative laylines,
  
• covering following sailors (critical for the leaders, as tacking off wasn't really an option for those following),
  
• a setup with a huge amount of range, especially from your fin (due to the rough water and variable wind)
• stamina

That last one deserves another look. The races were long, so 8 races plus long distance, while it doesn't sound like much, translated into a lot of sailing with the hammer down, in challenging conditions. Of course, on the last day, we were racing Formula in well over 30 knots of wind, so there was a survival element at work as well (having a 9.0 would have been very nice indeed...) While I'm in pretty good physical shape, it's hard to emulate the kind of conditioning you get from having an opportunity to reliably train on the water pretty much every day.

So for me, there are two areas of focus that I'm coming away with after this event:

• Fins - I'll be working with Dave Lassila of Finworks on rangier Formula fins. My current setup (all R16's) is very much Gorge optimized.
• Conditioning - I tend to be fine for one or two day of racing, but at some point my body runs out of steam. At the Gorge Challenge, the last few slalom heats on Saturday were pretty much just about holding on for me, and during Nationals, my body was very much feeling the strain. I don't live in the Gorge or the Bay Area, so I won't be able to simply up my amount of time on the water. That's why I decided to step up my conditioning and work with the folks at Bellingham Athletic Club; these 8 days of racing (with the only break being the long drive from the Gorge to San Francisco on Monday) clearly showed that to be the right direction.

On raking fins

A while back, I wrote about race prep and raking some fins forward a bit. Michael (of the excellent Peconic Puffin) asked in a comment:

"When you tilt the fin in the box, do you worry at all about the fin base on the "shallow" side (the front, in this case) leaving space for air bubbles to catch and induce spinout?"

So I thought I'd clarify a bit...
Tuttle box/base systems control the rake of the fin, as well as how deeply it goes into the box, via the taper at the front and back of the base. Luckily, converting a fin from a +6 to a +8 rake only involves a very minor 'tilt'. The +x cm notation, btw, is the somewhat arcane way in which Deboichet measure fin rake - it's forward relative to the 'original' rake of their fins from a few years back, measured at the thickest part of the foil 68 cm from the base; that measurement probably originated with sailors playing with fin rake and looking for a way to quantify those experiments. But I digress...

So you're only looking for a wee bit of change in the rake of the fin (large changes, like taking an original R13, say, and making it into a +8, would be better accomplished by getting the fin repotted completely). In my case, I played with rake by putting a bit of a shim in the top rear part of the box before tightening the fin. That resulted in a bit of rake forward, and I tested different settings. Once I found one, I wanted to fit the fin base flush in the box - neither because of the less than 1/4" that was sticking out the back (as that drag would be fairly negligible), nor the potential for air getting sucked down through any cavity (as the washers on the fin bolts tend to keep things pretty tight), but because anytime you have a sloppy fit inside a Tuttle box, you can generate all kinds of point-loading, which will eventually compromise the box.

The pivot point being the front top edge of the fin base, you are then faced with needing to file down the corner of the base diametrically opposed to that, and to fill in the other two corners. Filing down is easy; filling in isn't rocket science either, though. All it takes is a bit of epoxy and some four-ounce glass. For this project, it took four layers of glass to build it up enough at the corners, and then about twenty minutes of sanding with the palm sander to get the tapers all nice and straight and smooth.

Now you may ask why go through all that work - it's a bunch of work, there's some risk you might damage the blade as you do it. Proven fast race fins have a good resale market, so I could have just sold mine and gotten new ones that were already potted to the precise angle I wanted. The answer is that fins that come out of a mold in wet layup construction are not super-consistent. You can take two 'identical' Deboichets, and you'll likely find some difference in testing on the water. So getting rid of a blade you know works and taking the risk that the replacement won't work as well wasn't something I was prepared to do. Of course, the answer to that is higher-precision fin construction with a highly repeatable, low tolerance manufacturing process. Dave Lassila of Finworks has been working on just such a Formula fin, and I'll be writing about that soon. Suffice it to say, he's really onto something.

US Nationals - Multimedia frenzy

Some good stuff from the Nationals:

Bryan McDonald's podcast after the slalom - fun to hear Bill Weir's point of view (for one, he used three sails to my one).


An article in the SF Chronicle.


Some video from the slalom, courtesy of Paul Beulow:



This one's an interview with Jim Kiriakis on the SF local news:

US Nationals - Day 5 - Final

Whoa, it was windy... While Friday we were racing slalom in 20-25 knots, since the forecast for Saturday didn't show much to get excited about, Saturday morning greeted us with a thick marine layer far outside the gate and solid breeze early, which increased steadily. John Craig, the St. Francis Race Director, got off a quick heat for juniors and RS:X before it went ballistic. By the time the Formula fleet hit the water at about 12:30, it was getting furry.

The official windreading on the boat was 28-32 knots, and there was more on the outside. I had decided that this season, I wouldn't get a 9m sail - the rationale being that I'd only really be needing it one day or so during Nationals. This was that day...

We got two heats off. After the first one, the RC had the announcer remind sailors that they were responsible for their own safety, and to please not go out unless they thought they could safely complete the course.

I posted two 8ths - not stellar, but given how insanely overpowered I was on the 9.9 (only Ben, who outweighs me by 30 pounds, was on a sail that big - all the locals knew better), I was pretty happy with how things went.

My final Formula standing was 9th, with a 5th in slalom. I'm pretty happy with that, and have some ideas on how to improve on that in the next couple seasons. The event was great - well organized, challenging, and just plain fun. My body is about as battered as it's been in a few years, and today I actually passed up an opportunity to go for a sail in favor of a nap - go figure.

I'll post some more analysis after I'm back home (we've got a little family trip planned on the way home). In the meantime, there are links to pictures and results on the official Nationals Blog
(another example of how well this event was organized).

US Nationals Day 4 - Slalom

Brilliant sunshine and building breeze, so the RC called for slalom. It took a while for the breeze to fill in towards the shore, where the course was set, leading some to gripe that we should be running Formula races instead. Mother Nature came through for us, though, and we went into a round robin elimination series, with the fleet divided into 6 groups and everyone racing everyone else at least once. The 13 highest scoring sailors advanced to the final (it was supposed to be 12, but there was a tie).

I had 2 1st and 3 3rd place finishes in the qualification round, so I sat in 3rd overall going into the finals, comfortably qualifying. The breeze was filled in, and the water was getting a bit choppy as the strong ebb conspired with boat wakes and eddie lines to make life interesting on the course. I was nicely powered on my 7.2.

The final round consisted of five heats, with one throwout. I felt great, and with 12 guys crowding the start line, I was determined not to get rolled. So determined, in fact, that in the first finals heat I was over early by about a second - bummer, since I sailed a pretty good race. I followed that with a 3rd and a second, then we had a little break before the last two heats. As we were lining up for the start of the fourth heat, I baubled my jibe outside, and it took me too long to get to the start to be in a good position on the line - I got rolled, and had to claw my way back up to finish in 7th.

Now I was all fired up for the last heat - I got a great start, rolled Seth and made it to the mark in 3rd behind Jon Jay Ernst (who'd pulled an amazing start) and David Wells (who was a very consistent contender throughout the event). As we got to the second mark, I was catching up on them with good boat speed, and I saw David taking the mark pretty wide to get around Jon - so I decided to go for it and try for an inside line. I set the rail hard, and half-way around the turn stuffed the nose in a piece of stray chop - the resulting wipeout was pretty spectacular, as I did a superman off the front. When I came up for air, the mast was pointing down, and I feverishly started to recover among the whole fleet jibing around me - amazing that noone hit me. I finished that heat in 8th, getting a couple places back on the last two legs.

I felt great about my speed, and my jibes were pretty solid. Even with the OCS and the wipeout, I ended up in 5th overall for the slalom - I'm pretty happy with that. Slalom doesn't reward conservatism too much, so I'm glad I went for it; in the past, I don't think I would have tried to attack David's position on that second jibe, instead just focusing on warding off the challenge from Seth behind me. While it cost me a better placing, I think long-term, it's the right mind-set.

Links to results and photos on the official Nationals Blog.

Nationals - Day 3 - Long Distance

Today we ran the long distance race, which counts for two scores towards the Formula title. The sailing instructions lay out the course - up from a start line off Crissy to a windward mark, then down through a gate in front of the yacht club, another gate off Blossom Rock, a leeward mark near the north end of Treasure Island, back up through the Blossom Rock gate, and finish in front of the club. I started on port and got to the windward mark in reasonable position, right behind Steve Bodner and Steve Sylvester. I jibed right after the mark to avoid the hole that was developing further in, but then got stuck with the windshadow from the oncoming parade of boards. Took me a while to get going, and the 9.9 (picked in anticipation of big breeze further down the course) had me pumping and looking for more power the whole way down.

Closer to the second gate, I finally got powered up enough and was starting to make up some places. I rounded the leeward mark and, in an attempt to catch up to the pod of leaders strung out before me, I decided to take a hitch and tacked. I got a good lift and decided to play the shift, hoping to stay in phase. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that while it was ebbing big out in the channel, inside above Treasure Island I was getting much less of a boost. When I tacked off, I crossed Percey by quite a distance; when I tacked back, he had me by several hundred yards.

The leaders (except for Seth, it seems), all overstood the gate off Blossom, and the rest of them followed them; I was looking for the gate and getting Blossom mixed up with another channel marker. I finally finished in 11th; that leaves me in 7th for now, but Al Mirel has pulled away quite a bit with his 3rd place finish today, and Bodner and Ben are both moving up with consistent low scores, plus they've got DNF's to discard.

Word has it that we'll be doing 4 course races tomorrow, then race slalom on Saturday. Results, links to photos, etc. are on the official Nationals Blog.