Perception

What's important? Co-ordination or IQ? Well to be honest sailing is a perception game. The most successful sailors are those who have their heads out of the boat and see what is happening on the race course. The game in itself is simple, you need not be a genius to work out the optimal strategy or tactic but you do need to be very sharp to see where you are in the game.

Co-ordination, athletic ability and time in the boat/familiarity help in getting the head out of the boat and sharpening perception. If you have ever had the privilege to call tactics without having to worry about doing anything else on board you know how easy it is to be "smart" when you are able to look around full time.

Taking a Breather

Organic Mint Tea

Constantijn brewed up a great pot of of organic - or was it bio dynamic? - mint tea after which we sat on our cabin porch admiring the neighbouring caravans. I had just turned danish bacon, margarine, danish egg and finely ground pepper and salt into a Carbonara that would surely have stopped the Risorgimento dead in its tracks but which given the circumstances tasted acceptably good. Is any of this relevant?

Let's stick to facts: I can report that three members Dutch Belgian Moth Association, E.B, C.W., and G. G. had a dinner party in Horsens - to celebrate a week of boat work. Of note that in that location and at that time a European Championship was sailed in which E.B. distinguished himself by kicking ass.

Simon´s Xs

Titles are important. I bet you this one got a hook into you. I thought of "Bavarian Rhapsody". That would have been very appropriate as I spent three great days in a bucholic setting on the shores of a beautiful Bavarian lake. But I know gossip sells....

It is a matter of fact that I did run into, and spent the week end with not one but two of Simon´s Xs. We are talking moths here. One of them trounced me convincingly and if you look at the flags and are a sharp blade you might correctly surmise that it was not the young skinny one but the more mature shapely creature in a red dress.

The Bavarians, being very efficient, calculate the avg. speed of the boats and the highest speed of a race won by Harald was 5.2 knots while the lowest speed of a race won by me was 6.5 knots. We won all the races between us, Harald 4 and I 2. As consolation Harald thought I was fast low riding - for a foiler. As the courses were up and down but not necessarily perfectly aligned with the wind this gives only a rough idea of where low rider/foiler break even point might be. Most of the time there seemed to be a steady wind of 4.5 to 5 knots, just a fairy´s breath away from getting me up on foils.

I did learn one very important thing: the muscles used low riding are not the same as those used foiling. After a month on Garda I thought I was fit but days later I am still feeling the very long hours of low riding. I will work in a couple of low riding sessions a week if I can manage it. I would hate to get to a major championship and be knackered for the duration due to a first day of low riding.

Easy come easy go

All packed and ready to head back up across the alps. Going to pop up to the Ammer See for a little race and then home sweet home.

More than twenty sailing days and roughly 600 miles on Garda. So many details, so much honing to do, so much to learn - can I say: "workaholic"?

There is still loads to do.

Big Bang

Yesterday the mast came down while peacefully sailing upwind in about 12 knots; spreader bracket failure. By coincidence a volunteer rescue team was out practicing so I gave them something to do. They had a landing craft and they just lowered the front and we pulled the boat in. Last time I had that kind of service was at the 1978 Laser North Americans in Kingston. I had forgotten my stern plug and it was pretty disconcerting to get caught up by the leaders of the silver fleet who had started 10 minutes later. I was only 16 and I went through an uncomfortably long bout of self doubt before noticing that water was sloshing over the deck at every tack. Ian Bruce had organised a fantastic championship and a landing craft was on standby for quick on the water boat repairs. Pulling a fully swamped Laser into the boat required a bit more effort than hauling the Moth in. Draining it must have taken the better part of thirty minutes. They had a spare stern plug and didn´t charge me for it!

Today I buzzed down to Malcesine to strafe the M32s as they were waiting for a start. Easy come, easy go. About 20 miles of water covered down and back up the lake – just a short session. It´s Sunday.

Privilege

Air temperature slightly above 10° C, water temperature slightly below same, breeze-fickle; on standby for seven hours in order to get three and a half of good sailing. Sky overcast and raining most of the time. Pit stop required to change AOA as conditions go from light marginal to 15+ in the gusts. All this is to say that no other sailing project I can think of would motivate me to this extent.

The Moth is a truly exceptional machine. There were Melges 32s out practicing – state of the art keel boats crewed by a mix of professional and semi professional talent. Nice platforms from which to view some Moth action. And this crowd´s nowhere near as cruel as the Opti kids: they don´t laugh when diving is on the program. My body felt a little rebellious but all I had to do was look at the guys hiking the big boats down with the life lines in their gut to totally get over it and thrash myself up and down the lake.

Imagination

Garda has been unusual so far. The wind has been mostly light and I´ve only had one afternoon being bucked by the Torbolean waves which I came to tame. I whisper to them but they are not listening...yet.

Today my light air take off speed was in the low fives and just three weeks ago it had been in the high sixes. I´ve been imagining possibilities instead of limitations.

Road Trip

Driving down the highway with a boat on the roof conjures memories of North America and Laser sailing in the very distant past. Now the car and the boat are quite a bit faster but the autobahn despite, being the holy grail of motorheads world wide, doesn´t quite evoke the limitless freedom of the Trans - Canada Highway. The sound track has changed too. Feels like a time warp.

The destination ends up being Torbole, Malcesine is running too many regattas and there´s no space in their dinghy park for my Moth. Just as well, the breeze will be a little stiffer...

The trip doesn´t end here. I head down to Florence to see my sister and drive my wife to the airport in Pisa before heading back to Garda. I cross snow capped mountains three times. Italy looks beautiful to me this time around.

T.I.B.

Time in the boat has always been the single magic ingredient of speed and solid results. I had planned to head to the South of Spain for a long training session but I've changed my plans. I'll stay closer to home and head for Lake Garda. I'll be there most of April and May and perhaps a few days in June too. I will be splitting my time between Malcesine and Torbole to get the full spectrum of breezes.

Anyone interested in joining can just drop me a comment with contact details. I'll be happy to help you organise your stay - I do speak the language after all.

Other than that all I have to say is that the last couple of sessions have been way above expectations. The boat is becoming almost boringly easy to sail. Light air take off has improved markedly and so has control in the breeze not to mention going round corners. 100 hours on Garda should buff things up a little further.

Photo is from Belfagor flying on Lake Garda. Note the massive bow wave coming all the way to the stern! Very innefficient way of doing 20 knots. Prehistoric monster.

Caterpillar

Last week end was a case of back to school. After a year away from the helm and back with my teammate from three years ago I ventured back into the very competitive Belgian Snipe scene. More than thirty boats on a short start line (If you were to scale the fleet size to the course size it's the equivalent of 100 boats on a normal course) and then very short up and down courses.

If the lessons learnt are proportional to the trouncing experienced then much was learnt. This sort of racing puts a premium on boat control on the starting line and boat handling in general. It should have come as no surprise that after spending all my time on a Moth weighing 15% of a Snipe my time on distance would be a little off.

But the most valuable lesson had to do with boat set up. And it can be translated to the Moth or any other class. I have a special traveller system on the Snipe which allows me to accurately control the leach. However, unlike the standard system it is not self tacking. In medium size fleets and long courses this system is an advantage (and there are results to prove it). But in tight spots it degrades boathandling and distracts from tactical awareness. That means it is no good for the type of racing we were doing last week end and it is questionable for a continental or world championship where sooner or later you will get in a tight situation. No one needs distractions while trying to get out of jail.

Boats need to be kept as simple as possible and as automatic as possible or at least have a simple default mode that delivers 95% of potential performance. When I am steering an offshore racer I don't look for peaks in my speed, I try to keep my average as high as possible by not slowing down much in a rough patch or light spot. I have my trimmers set up the boat for accelleration and try to keep the groove as wide as possible while still being fast. Similarly a dinghy should be set up to never slow down. It's the best average speed that wins a race.

By the way a big thanks to Max and Jan for their superlative organisation of the Antwerp Snipe Cup. Now I'm going back in the cocoon and when I come out I'll have wings.

Mothodology

I didn't just write Summer of 86 so I could parody Ray Chandler. There's something about the primitive Liberas that is relevant to the Moth evolution of today. At that stage Liberas were still derivative of established type forms. Either scaled up Fd's or modified IOR designs or a combination of both. This made them highly flawed boats requiring idiosynchratic gear adaptation and out of the ordinary sailing techniques. It's only later that better understanding and application of physics led to rational designs with a performance envelope that was previously unimaginable. Eventually it all became very simple and very fast.

Foiling Moths and the way they are sailed are evolving in a similar way. Foils have been developed empirically and slapped together in configurations believed to be optimal. This has given rise to Mothodology - the quasi mystical pseudo science of tweaking a bunch of parameters to try to get the things to behave properly. There are various religious schools that worship AOA, gearing, wand length and other talismans so powerful that they must be kept secret and pixellated lest the uninitiated lay their eyes upon them.

The ones who don't tweak and just sail win the major championships -Ok they do let the Gurus help them with the set up but they don't seem to waste too much time on the various religions.

Mothodology gets more complicated by the day, mesmerizing the neophytes, luring them into the labyrinth from which escape is difficult. So let me be the prophet of the One True Way. Physics is simple, it is clear and its truth serves humanity well, it will serve the practicing Moth sailor too. If you flunked it in school stick to sailing and let the believers do the work for you.

Sooner than later, light will shine and Moth sailing will get simpler and much faster. But beware: lose yourself not in the temples of Mothodology.

Shark Again

Back on Shark. Time to see if we can repeat a clean score, or if those three firsts had just been flukes. http://giovannigaleotti.blogspot.com/2008/12/317.html.

We face a couple of challenges right off the bat. First the weather. The racing area is smack dab in the middle of three minor lows. The forecast is for a shift 50 degrees to the left at pretty much a constant rate throughout the day. Looking at the isobars the only predictable thing is unpredictability. That's how it turns out; the wind ends up shifting 30 degrees to the right. On top of that, the breeze is a patchy 10 to 14 with a minefield of holes.

The second challenge is our new beautiful, super fast 3DL 850 carbon sails. There has been no time for tuning and we will be playing with the rig tension between races. Given the tricky conditions our beautiful but unfamiliar sails could become a distraction if we only give it half a chance.

When expecting large random shifts, the thing to do is start well and then consolidate any gains immediately. I ask the guys to prepare for a fight as there is no way we will lead 100% of the time as we had in the steadier conditions of our previous sail.

We are early on the line in the first start and have to shed too much speed. Terrible start. We take some transoms and after a couple of tacks to clear our air find a lane that takes us to the weather mark in fourth. A couple of well placed jybes on the first run and we get inside at the leeward mark and into second. The first boat is too far ahead and that's how we finish.

The next two races good starts, tight covering and good tactical runs allow us two victories, one comfortable, one tight despite some minor boathandling issues.

With a 2,1,1 we win the day, not perfect but we will take it. Good job, Christopher, Jan, Jim, Steve, Joost, and Giel. Those sweet new sails are well deserved.

Summer of 86

She was deeply flawed but I was passionate about her. I made her better, I made her sing and she performed for me and for me alone.

Belfagor was a Libera D, 7,50 metres long. The hull had been designed with the IOR in mind, canoe body, fine in the ends, tiny little laser sized rudder to reduce wetted surface. What were they thinking when they took out 500kgs. and slapped racks and trapezes on her?

No one had managed to sail her more than a few hundred metres when they asked me to see what could be done. For starters you just had to sail. You had to know that if you heeled more than 15degrees you had to call a tack because tack she would, like it or not.

We went to work on an improvement program. The number of crew trapezing was increased to 5. The next step was to control her on the downwinds. I remembered having heard tall tales about 18s and how they were using such long poles (before A sails) that in a puff you reportedly had to push the tiller down as the boat would just bear off on its own, going sideways through the water. The equivalent of opposite lock to correct oversteer on a car; you had to align the rudder blade with the flow just to avoid tripping over it. So ass backwards, it was said to spoil a helmsman's reflexes for anything else.

On goes a 6 m long pole and a narrow head, wide foot, super flat 100 sq. m. spinnaker. The tall tale turns out to be not so far from the truth. We win our class in the Cento and a bunch of other races too.

That summer I sailed four long distances on her, each one 19 hours long, never taking my hand off her helm (nobody else on board dared to touch it). What did she give me for all that attention? Pain. I know no one's made her sing since but is that consolation?

Ambrogio's Law

Ambrogio's Law: Always go to bed hungry.

Was Ambrogio Morelli right? I don't know. He was second in the 1935 Tour de France among other things. For me those are serious creds.

Coffee and a Donut

Here in the northern latitudes it is freezing and moth sailing is momentarily out of the question for me. However it's time to train and train hard. I'm already 3kgs off my Christmas highs. A Shaolin monk could be proud of me.

I'm getting on so well that as a reward I had myself a coffee and a donut after lunch yesterday. I was high for six hours. Funny thing is some people live off the stuff and most of them don't look none too happy for it.

Is there a lesson in that?

Getting Around or How to Jybe

I've only just begun learning to sail a moth and here I am explaining how to jybe. Am I arrogant? Yes, in large part. Then there's the fact that I still remember the learning process so I'm well positioned to share it and - here goes the arrogance again - I haven't seen much in the way of well written guides that explain the most basic mechanics. I hope this very brief intro saves beginners some time.

Basics: Sailing a moth downwind is largely like riding a bike. The boat is inherently unstable and the pilot must steer for balance. Since it is very fast the centrifugal force will make the boat heel towards the outside of a turn. This translates to head up - heel to leeward, bear off - heel to windward.

Just as on a bike, a turn is initiated by a weight transfer towards the inside of the turn and then steering is adjusted to keep the boat in balance through the turn. What's different from a conventional boat? On a slow conventional boat you steer first and then shift the weight (especially in the case of a roll jybe). On a Moth such a manoeuvre is looking for trouble; it is the equivalent of turning the handle bars on your bike before leaning into the corner.

Viewed from the outside, a jybing moth will appear to remain flat and that's because steering is used to keep it that way. However always remember that the only way a Moth will stay flat while turning is if weight has initially been transferred towards the inside of the turn.

There are surely many more fine points to jybing but if you keep this one in mind you will get around.

Jybe

Advice from a former Olympian: If you are not happy with the direction you are going, jybe....

Getting it Together

Moving on is the current paradigm but it´s a little weak in my books. To me life´s a puzzle - you don´t want to bin any of the pieces. Now is the time to take inventory of what I was dealt last year and to see where it fits in the big picture.

2008 was a season of remarkable achievements that didn´t come together to deliver many results. Notable exception: second place in the Open Belgian Snipe Championship with Floris.

What about all the rest: an amazing performance in the North Sea Race where the class divisions robbed us of a crushing victory over our on the water rivals; learning to sail and tune a Moth in virtual isolation; sailing an interesting season in the Snipe having swapped roles with Floris; doing tactics for a great crew on a Swan 70 in Sardinia; surviving the Moth Worlds. The one thing I´m proudest of is keeping us off the sand banks in front of Harwich in low visibility when the GPS failed. It was a short bright moment of getting it all together when it really mattered.