The final Leg of the Extreme Sailing Asia series was held in Muscat, capital city of the Sultanate of Oman. As always with these events we did not get much of a chance to explore the country, which was a shame as it was a real change in culture with very different dessert / mountainous coastline. Definitely be worth a proper visit.
The racing though was very standard for the extreme 40 fleet, racing in the enclosed mouth of the channel into the Wave Muscat marina in front of a grandstand on the harbour wall.
Day 1 went very badly for us, it was very light never more than 5 knots. With the wind direction across the channel the race committee opted for reaching starts, This meant no real tactical options other than hitting the line at top speed. We were unfortunately still very slow with our 3 year old sails. Nick had found all year with Bundy and Barney in the I shares cup and then me and Will in Asia, as soon as it was not hull flying conditions we really struggled for pace, we ended the day a few points adrift in 6th.
Day 2 Saw maybe 6knts of wind but with the big change that the race committee managed to fit a upwind first leg to the course which instantly gave us tactical options. Although still slow we chose our 1st beat strategy well and had the best day of the fleet, moving up to 4th overall and closing the points deficit on the leaders.
Day 3 saw a first for us, Match Racing! This was great fun, and being just ten or so days before the Americas Cup was an interesting experiment to see how successful match racing in multihulls could be…… It worked very well, we had some great racing in the round robin, finishing 4th overall and qualifying for the 3rd/4th playoff against the current event leaders redbull. We both had a lively prestart which saw a even start with us both having split onto opposite tacks, redbull just had the advantage crossing by half a boat length on the first cross. They held a 1 boat length lead for 2 laps with us snapping at there heels at each mark rounding, which eventually put enough pressure on them to foul up there kite furl while the boys on Bt did a perfect job again, this meant we were far quicker in opening our spinnaker on the final leg, I gybe setted and our final gybe took us across the finish some 2 lengths clear! We were very pleased to take 3rd. The final saw some great pre start action between Rumbo Almeria and Oman Red, Ian Walker, Shirley Robertson, Stevie Mitchell And Nick Hutton are all very experienced match racers and it showed, they won the prestart and never gave the faster Red an passing opportunity.
Day 4 saw a massive change in the weather, wit 18 to 22 knots on the race course, this was probably the most disappointing day for us we never capitalised on the big wind and fell some 8 points back on the leaders. This was mostly down to our starting strategy and some bad tacking in the waves which I in particular hadn’t sailed in since the 08 season. Untill now the Red Bull guys had looked like thre was no way they would get knocked off top spot until they capsized at the leeward mark. The boat was swiftly recovered and all the sailors were in good shape, with the exeption of a nasty cut to double gold medallist Roman Hagara’s hand which needed 16 stitches and ruled him out of the final days sailing (coach Andrew Macpherrson tacking the stick).
The final day again saw a good 18 knots which unfortunatel quickly died down to 1-2 knots which limited the number of races held. We set our eyes on a podium finish in Oman which would give us 3rd overall in the series two, and put a great finals day racing together upto the final race. We reduced china teams 11 point lead to just 3 going into the final double points race, meaning we needed to beat them with one boat in between us. The race started well for us with a good start on port in a controlling position over china. We tacked in to the windward mark, with Oman Red just tacking infront of us, we almost sailed around them but they just managed to build speed and open there kite ahead of us and won the race (and with it piped the wave into first!), by not quite getting infront of Red, china was able to close the gap and get inside of us, so that when we gybed they instantly gybed on our wind and overtook us, with just one lap to go we new we had to not only overytake china but also red so we split at the leeward mark gambling on a big gain which unfortunately did not come, and allowed the wave to overtake.
We therefore finished in 4th overall, with some great race wins, and especially pleasing 2nd overall and 1st overall in the round the island race in Hong Kong. We were very happy to be pushing the European champs so hard considering the boat had not been close during the summer.
Bt has stopped its sponsorship at the end of this event, but we are quite hopefull we will be racing the summer season under a different sponsors colours….. watch this space!
No comments:
Post a Comment