Both the Chicago and Detriot NOOD regattas have been marked by light winds. During the Chicago Nood only 4 races were completed over three days. Our result was fair placing 2nd overall. We are still very much relearning the boat after some of the changes that we made in preparation for this season.

We sailed the majority of the regatta at our loose rig settings this seemed to help the boat power up in the light wind while going to weather. This was a new change for 2007 making our mast more adjustable and trying to optimize the set up for each given condition. In the loose set up we had good forward speed but sometimes struggled with pointing ability during the races. This could have been due to other factors such as the very spotty breeze on Friday and Saturday. The courses where short with each leg measuring 1.5 to 1.75 miles, this meant that you wanted to make at the most three tacks during the upwind leg and spend the rest of the time sailing as fast as possible to the side of the course with the most breeze. The boat that executed the best this year was Nitemare. Each race they sailed to the left hand side of the course to the port lay line did one tack and then sailed to the weather mark and tacked around the mark. This gave them the option to drive there boat in fast bow down mode the whole leg. While the other boats fought for height and sailed slower, they were able to power away from the fleet.

In hindsight we should of fought harder to win the pin end of the line in each race. We accomplish this in race one but then we failed to continue to the left and allowed Nitemare to take that position.
Downwind we utilized our asymmetrical spinnaker which had mixed performance. Evolution and Pied Piper utilized thier asymmetric sails ours a code 1.5 and there's a code 1. Meanwhile Nitemare utilized a code 1 symmetric spinnaker and was able to protect and hold there lead throughout the entire downwind leg of race one. After race one Evolution scraped there A-sail for the remainder of the regatta. We continued to utilize ours and found that the sail was not very effective in under 8 knots of wind because it was to full and the leach would cup when the boat came out of jibes hurting our acceleration. In 8 to 12 knots (the code 1.5 designed wind range) the sail performed very even with our competitors sailing with symmetric spinnakers.

The real bright spot of the regatta was the crew work of the foredeck team and the trimmers. Our sets and take downs with the symmetric and asymmetric spinnakers were almost perfect and both of primary trimmers Stu Thompson and Dave Shriner did a great job adjusting to the new clutch system for the spinnaker sheets and guys.        

With our new rig setting we were able to sail the boat very fast on the upwind legs but on the short course we quickly ran out of room to leg out and away from our competitors. In our next course racing event we need to work harder on converting forward speed into upwind height. There will be several small changes to our sailing style and sails that might help with this. First when we get the boat up to speed out of a tack we have to more aggressively add backstay tension. Next the main may benefit from a more flexible top batten this may add some more lift in exchange for speed. It looks like it will be a very close year of racing so will have to make improvements in each event to win the GL 70 season championship.

During the light air postponements the majority of the crew were also able to perfect the art of Bunk Boarding. Ben Biddick, Mike Rehe and Eric Jochum executed and held a pyramid for 5 minutes.

Jack Jennings
Pied Piper Racing