Day 2 of racing in the 2010 Tornado World Championships was as forecast with the fleet sitting on the shore for most of the day until being sent out in a light 4 – 6 knots of breeze coming from the north-east; a very different breeze from the previous day’s north-west. The race area had a choppy inconsistent wave which would make life interesting. At times you could compare the water to a washing machine with waves crossing and making life difficult. The breeze was patchy and the right hand side of the course seemed to pay off for most. Two races completed today.
Brett and Ryan - 6th and 4th. Slipping to 4th overall after the Sach brothers finished with two seconds to sneek past into 3rd.
Brett’s description of his day: “Today we made a few mistakes and had to work hard to recover. We felt underpowered but managed to make some good decisions in our recovery of picking some bad shifts early on in each race.”
Adam and Jamie - 16th and 14th. Didn’t go as well in the lighter breeze but still finished with a 16th and 14th to move up the ladder to 9th.
Jamies’s description of today’s racing: “First race, Shocker of start, mid fleet to top mark. Stayed with fleet for downwind. Second lap went far right but didn’t do too well. catch up on next downwind. Last upwind was good. Happy but struggling with height. Pretty choppy, in and out of the wire all the time. Awkward sailing. Second race - Cracker of start down on the pin. Really close to the pin rope. Red Bull guys had to drop down behind us. Somewhere between 12th and 15th to top mark. Kept in our position most to the race meeting Jack Benson and Thilo at all different angles of the course. Nice that the breeze came in a bit more in the last half of the race. Good racing."
Jack and Thilo moved up the ladder from 30th to 17th with an 18th and 13th.
Thilo’s version of racing today: “Long postponement. Pretty nice sail with not much wind. Nice sunny conditions. Starts were really bad for us but we tried to make up and finish but not as good as we would have liked.”
Myself and Dave didn’t fair too well in the light choppy conditions being underpowered watching boats flying two on the wire whilst only managing to get one on the wire for most of the two races today. Slipping back to 20th overall with a horrible race in the first and recovering to a respectable 30th in the 5th race. The irony was that we worked hard on our starts and were really happy with two good starts. Unfortunately, the lighter crews were able to fly a hull earlier which allowed them to climb up on us and forced us to tack out of their dirty air. A few bad decisions going the wrong side of the course didn’t help either. We are hoping for more breeze tomorrow but the forecast doesn’t look good for us.What amazes me is even with our additional weight we were still able to make up positions on most fo the downwind legs by sailing over the top of other boats and then getting down below them which is hard to do when you are carrying 15 to 20 kgs more than most crews.
Our biggest issue is the boat we are using was DEN1 and the crew were only 140kg (we are 177kg) so all of their battens are planks and we don’t have any soft or medium battens so tomorrow we have some work to do to find some soft battens so we can try and find some more power. When we have two on the wire we have good boat speed and reasonable height but when we have one on the boat we lack height and power.
Peter and Ethan – 26th and 22nd. 27th overall slipping back one position.
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