A weekend of sailing- fantastic! Wind guru did its usual guess work and got it wrong, suggesting Saturday would be between 0 and 1 knot! It was fairly calm in the morning, with 5-8 knots, but the afternoon was a little more lively hitting somewhere around 10 knots. Sunday was more exciting at around 14-16knots!
The format of the weekend was:
Saturday:

• Practice starts
• Practice races
• Follow the leader
• Course sailing/racing
• And theory of course!

Sunday:

• Race practice around a single buoy
• Real racing with the sunday racers

They did a good deal of videoing to provide some really helpful constructive criticism. This was very revealing not to mention embarrasing!

This was a nightmare from start to finish! We went down to Bewl Valley for a race afternoon. We started off with our new main halyard in place. It ran really smoothly, but sadly as it wasn't rigged correctly we had trouble- I won't go into details, but we had to drop the mast to rectify this!
Then eventually out on the water everything was fine until we decided to test the gennaker. The lines were slightly tangled, so we had to land, pull it out and then sort out the lines, repack it then launch again!
Then out on the water for the second time, the race got underway. The course was one of those that has a clear down wind stretch, but also has another strech where you might get away with gennaker too. We struggled to get the gennaker flying, then when we did, we struggled to get it back down effectively. Eventually on several downwind turns to drop it it decided it preferred to hide underneath the  boat, where it got stuck! We sent dad over the bow to retreieve it. By this point we were well and truely out of the race and a bit fed up of the issues and poor winds!
Home time!

Well WindGuru predicted some dreadful winds of 5-7 knots right up until the day before the sail, when it was suggesting 10, progressing to 14 in the afternoon.
 
Today is novice race day!! Hooray!! We were definitely up for some racing; and having mastered the gennaker in very light winds, felt sure that slightly better winds would add pace to our big boat with a helm and 2 crew, giving us the advantage we needed.
 
We spent a couple of hours in the morning again practising with the gennaker. Winds were a bit gusty, with a prevailing wind of maybe 9-11 knots and gusting to a whopping 12-14! Hmmm. So we went from pulling some speed with the gennaker to having a floppy deflated balloon draped stylishly across the front of the boat!
 

Sorry, this is a little retrospective, but I was busy and didn't get a mo to blog this sail!
Winds were predicted to be fairly calm for the day so I wasn't expecting much, but at the same time gennaker practise was the order of the day, so although not extreme, it was very freindly training speed of around 10knots.
When we arrived at the slipway we were entertained by a mini regatta of remote controlled boats! Good fun until we wanted to launch without sinking all of them in one foul swoop! At this point the wind speed was hitting the lofty heights of 5knots...
Staarted off with a bit of light wind sailing, getting the weight shift up front and ducking the side of the boat into the water to reduce drag...but that didn't quite satisfy- I had in mind something more extreme. Anyway, we've all had days like that- shame it wasn't even particularly sunny!

We're planning on taking her out next weekend for a burn across Bewl. The plan- test out the new addition of a trapeze and see how fast we can go with the Gennaker out!

We're booked in for a novice race later in May, so we want to improve our speed sailing. Have been reading up on tips from the Captain's Blog (http://wivenhoe-sailing.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html) who seems to have got a good deal more sailing out of this season than we have!

Need to work on the planing- credit to the captain for the following tips:

Went down to Bewl Water on bank holiday Easter Monday. Me, my brother and my dad were going to do a bit of sailing in the morning then catch up with the family to take part in the afternoon Easter events (face painting, egg throwing, Easter fancy dress, Easter egg hunt etc.-must point out that between me and my brother we have 4 kids)!
 

...a little late after the event, but thought I would try and document as much of the sailing season as possible!
 
Well, we planned our first sail date way back in January when the snow was thawing and we thought we'd be fairly safe planning a March sail in terms of freezing weather....hmmm. But enthusiasm made us ignore sense and come the 6th March we hooked up the boat to the trusty Volvo estate and with me, my brother Tim and my father David, we headed off to Bewl Water for our first season.