Photo by Al Schonborn

Clark Lake is a challenging place to sail, especially when the breeze has a southerly or northly direction.  It is a beautiful place.  The Clark Lake Yacht Club is amazing. If you ever have a chance to sail out of Clark Lake Yacht Club, do it. 

There are many holes puffs and shifts.  Sailing here is CHALLENGING. 

BNAC 2022 had some interesting things that were written into the Sailing Instructions.

1.       No throw-outs

2.       A Black Flag after one General Recall. 

Saturday and Sunday we shared the course with 3 other fleets.  That is 5 rolling starts.  This helped to keep things moving.  We ended up only having one general recall and no competitors were OCS on the next start.  The threat worked.

Scoring:  Possible Black Flags and no throw-outs changed our strategy a bit.  We summed up our priorities before the regatta as follows:

1.       Stay clean, if you lose in the protest room, you can NOT win the regatta. 2 circles on a foul will put you back in the fleet.

2.       Get to the top 3 in the fleet. Top 3s should be good enough to win. Getting a 10 will make it hard to win.

3.       Protect the asset. If you run aground, break something, get hit, you are unlikely to win.

Conditions

First day was canceled and that gave all of us time to catch up.  It ended up being a pretty great day!

Saturday and Sunday had us racing in a gradient SW wind building throughout the weekend.  Started off 5-10 knots and building to 8-15 on Sunday.  The wind was on and off, left, and right. 

The boats that changed gears and reacted to the changing conditions were rewarded with added speed.  Trevor likened it to going to catholic mass. Sit, stand kneel, repeat.



Photo by Al Schonborn

Boat Handling

While we did concentrate on coming up in the lifts and down in the headers.  It really helped to have the sails eased enough were we accelerated while coming up in a lift.  If our sails were in too tight as we came up after a lift, we could not accelerate as much as when we eased the sails as we came up to the new upwind direction.  We did this in all the conditions, not just in depowering mode. Ease, Hike, Trim. Even in lighter breeze.

Compass: Never looked at it.  The shifts were so huge and frequent that Dennis Martinelli may have run out of areas on the boat to scribe them throughout the day.

Photo by Al Schonborn

Up Wind

We had our jib cars all the way forward all weekend.  We felt it was better to have the power in the light spots.  On Saturday when it was light we had our main halyard eased to the lower halyard ball.  It gave the main a more powerful full shape.  We tried to keep all the telltales flying on all the sails all of the time.

Photo by Al Schonborn

Downwind

We tried to leave the Spinnaker Guy eased and cleated for a reach as conditions were shifty. The wind would get light and go forward (a velocity header).  This allowed Trevor to ease the guy as he was just pulling the guy back as needed.

Up in the lulls down in the puffs. 

We had the best success when Trevor sat forward of the windward shroud on the windward rail and I sat leeward pressed up against the mainsheet.

Photo by Al Schonborn

Reaching

Yes, we had reach legs.  Reach legs seem easy but there are gains if you work the boat up in the puffs and down in the lulls or vise versa.  In the lighter reaches we noticed other crew members sitting to leeward and holding the clew of the jib, trimming it directly up, down, in, out, fore, and aft.  We quickly copied this and found it was indeed faster.  If its light, try to get as far forward as possible.  You can not get crew weight too far forward (this is true up and downwind in light conditions). 

When it got breezier, we almost got up on a plane after falling off and easing the jib/main to take advantage of a good size puff. 

The reach legs ran east-west.  Clark Lake is less than a half mile North to South.  We always tried to get to the leeward 1/3 of the lake as we felt we got more puffs for more duration.  Once we tried a little too hard and almost got rolled.  The point is that the breeze needs distance to get down from over the trees. 

Boat Setup

Same as usual.

We did check our rig tension after the last day of racing.  We had 420lbs of pressure on the PT-2 loose Gauge.  This is more than the 250lbs that is recommended in the tuning guide.  Other boats that had 250lbs had noticeable headstay sag.  Not sure if it was faster or not.  I think in the puffs I would have wanted a tighter forestay as it was flat water.

Crew weight about 370lbs.  We did try to stow as much of our gear in the forward port cuddy as possible.  Usually we try to keep stuff that could stay dry in the aft cuddy, but the boat stayed pretty dry in the flat water.

We didn’t turn on the VHF as the RC didn’t use it much.


   Photo by Al Schonborn          

                                                            
                                                                   Photo by Al Schonborn                                                                                                                                                  

Trevor Bach & Ed Montano, Atrevida 5223