24 hours sail-race preparation

In late June, we talked about going to 24 uurs zeilrace. In late July, we registered Berta, a Halberg-Rassy 36 155, in the race. We are now 6 people with some sail experience.

Boats are racing for the miles among scattered marks in IJsselmeer, Waddenzee and Markermeer. Starting on Friday evening and finishing in 24 hours.

Preparations

After registration we decided to have at least 2 trainings with night sailing, and with spinnaker.

Last Friday we’ve got a package with vimpels and numbers:

First training

Was held on 12-13 August with a half of our crew. Max and I skipped due to vacations with families.

Second training

It was last weekend, 19-20 August. I took Olka, with me, as she were thinking about joining the race after summer camp on Shtandard.

We had a long discussion ashore about the plan of that training. As we lack briefing it during the workdays before, everybody had different ideas. For example I was planning to spend full night of practicing tacks, start procedure and passing the locks (mostly hoisting and unhoisting sails and starting stopping engine at specific line). But the guys voted for going to sleep around 0100 or 0200.

We also raised concerns about starting from Hoorn: dry weeks and growth of water plants plus moving the boat to Hoorn before Friday could be tricky.

Discussions were transferred to the sea and we ended up training some start simulations at SPORT-C yellow bouy.

I think around 0030 we were back in Pekelharinghaven, drinking beer and talking. And by 0100 we went to sleep with a plan to leave by 0830. Which was not going to happen.

We left around 1100, after trying spinnaker, which we borrowed from Hougaida.

At sea we hoisted spinnaker right after hoisting the mainsail, but we put tack corner right into the spinnaker pole fitting and didn’t have a down-haul. That appeared to be a mistake which let us broke a spinnaker pole’s fitting as a result.

But we still had some fun running under the colors!

During 3 hours of Saturday sailing we did a lot of tacks and got some nice timing in it: we ended up keeping 2.6kts after tacking at 5.6kts.

Also did practice braking: by giving slack to boom-sheet while luffing up to loose 2-3kts and then bearing away back to the course.

Here is a track after unhoisting spinnaker:

The type of spinnaker pole that Berta had appeared to be old and uncommon nowdays, so spare parts were impossible to find. But Luba used the magic word race and a new old pole 4.2m long (slightly longer than damaged one but a proper size for Berta) appeared, raising race budget with 300EUR more.

Now we have last working week before the race. We plan to have 3 video-calls to discuss our propoer course, racing rules and final points.

Lazily we look into proper spinnaker rigging, like https://waypointamsterdam.nl/spinnaker/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL3QzQusquE for ex.

And I’m studying Racing Rules of Sailing:

Links

1. Regels voor wedstrijdzeilen 2021-2024
2. Berichten aan Zeevarenden (BaZ) (Notices to Mariners)
3. Chart NL1810
4. waterplanten.nu
5. Rak24u app