We turned on the buoy just in front of two RS 600's and pull in the main, both of us out on the wire and tightened up - the RS shouted across that we were too tight and he was head to wind and we glided away through the rough seas.

Out on the wire we pulled in the mast over rotation preventer to line the mast with the sail and the boat jumped ahead by another couple of knots.

This short sail was a good introduction to sailing a modern catamaran but we had yet to fit the pole for the spinnaker.

the test sail was a pursuit race - although we had entered earlier in the week we were not on start list. We argued about our starting position and eventually the race officer agreed to let us start with a 49er.

We put the kite on the boat and sailed off early to tested out the spinnaker. It went up ok and we check angles on and off the wind.

The 49er was all over the place at the line, we arrived near the line but didn't hear the gun so followed the 49er across the start. We went high on the 49er and just blew passed it. We sailed our own race to the first buoy and threw in only two tacks to arrive before all the Dart 18's. Up with the kite and off we go not quite getting it right. Even so we are ripping though the monohulls fleet and pass the last cat a Dart Sting.

Second and third laps we keep the kite up for the reacher leg as well as the run leg. On the third lap we could see the Tornado and Hurricane 5.9 gaining on us up wind. The only boat on the down wind section, a long way down, is a Laser 5000. We gain on them but are still behind them as I see the finish line being laid on the up wind section.

We then are not going to pass the Laser but by match racing the two big cats we make sure they just mess one another up and we get a second. The Tornado got caught on starboard by the hurricane to loose its third place.

We later checked the boat and found the mast rotation was not working to its full extent - so we could have been a bit faster down wind.

.... tests index