Happy New Year

With the year almost gone me, Sam and Benny have had a great last few weeks of the decade on the water... we got a quick one lap dash at our first race against the League guys a few weeks back, where we ignored the forecast and went big only to sail into a 20knt s/e breeze that just seemed to get fresher all day, and with only 3 other big rigs to match up against at the League, this was going to be super fast or super dead. And it turned into a little of both, we started about a min or 2 late, so not to ruin the League guys start... well thats what im telling everyone!!! In reality we just didnt hear any guns or see any flags cause we where too busy just trying to stay upright in the freshening breeze, as well as waiting around for about 40 min as the starter decided to wear out his favourite flag-- postpone start!!!
With nearly all small rigs to race against we decided to sail our own race and to our surprise by the first mark we had already passed a few boats, rounding the top mark and trying to stay away from the huge tanker parked off Point Piper it was 2 sail all the way down the Harbour, most of which fully out of control, half way down we crossed paths with the notorious Manly Ferry and apparently it doesnt know about port/starboard rules!!!! So with both our bows pointing directly at each other and closing fast, and the GPS reading around 19knts, we pushed hard to get to windward of the green big steel bastard. Another 20 odd feet to leward and we would be asked for our boarding tickets. So with this game of chicken over and watching most of the League guys go to leward we had picked up more boats by the bottom mark rounding and we sat nicely mid fleet
On the long windward leg back up to Shark Is the small rigs were very fast and we lost a couple of boats, then as we rounded Shark I decided to really push my young crew to the extreme... kite up boys, and they turned back and looked a little stunned... but up with the kite and full speed down past Bradleys Head for one of THE fastest rides this boat has seen for a very long time... GPS top speed reading of 24knts... and the boys handled it, but we still had to gybe back to round the mark and with the breeze pushing easily over 20knts this didnt go too well, on the gybe drop we hit the piss... not to worry as we knew what went wrong, so we rested on the centreboard and watched 3 or 4 League boats with small rig put on a show of daredevil crash test dummys.
At this point we where having lots of trouble just getting back uprite, finally we got going again but now we were having trouble bearing away, so a few more swims and we had broken a few mainsail battens... so we called it a day... and what a day
The following satday back at SFS the weather gods where shining again and with almost a carbon copy of the previous week we made the same mistake... not listening to the weather forecast, so big rig in 18knts from the S/E , hot sunny and clear blue skys, but this time we could take it a bit easier and do some practice runs of where we went wrong last time. And this time we had the video cam strapped to the boom which Sam seemed to enjoy very much... video edit coming soon!!!
So after 2 perfect Sydney Harbour, near identical, top end big rig days the boys were smileing and i was very happy with their performance as well as how the boat was responding and handling the fresh stuff with no broken bits, apart from some broken battens that can easily be fixed