RaimonLand Platu Open: Day 0

Greetings from the Ocean Marina Yacht Club in Pattaya, Thailand! The Raimonland Platu Open Championships are about to open tomorrow, and the crack team from SMU was making good headway in today's training. We weren't the only boat out training today, so you can really feel the anticipation of a fleet race of 15 boats tomorrow! Imagine the scene at the start!

For the uninitiated, the Raimonland team from SMU consists of:

Alvin -Helms

Fiona - Mains

Louis - Jib Trim

Lips - Box

Junjia - Mast

Fang - Bow

Moi, Jason - your blog editor, shore liason, transportation negotiator, and friendly reserve (i had to create more positions for myself to fill while the main team sails.

We were assigned Platu 109, a brand new, sparkling clean boat, so almost-new that our dear Lips said that he “dares to sleep in the box.” The boat was in good condition, looked liked it was cleaned on upslip recently, and came with racing Techron sails! We were all excited, and after some simple tunings and getting-used-tos, we set off at noon to brave the South China Sea.
Today’s training was a commando-styled one. Enter, execute, and extract: We entered the race course, executed what we wanted to train on, and extracted ourselves from the course when we completed our objectives.

According to the locals here, the winds today were moderate, but to us, Singaporeans, they were more of the good strong winds you see in RM. We made good headway in training today. Essentially, our objective was to get acquainted with the boat’s reactivity, and iron out any last minute crew synchronizations. Some key issues we faced today were:

1) Do proper tacks without losing speed, and getting the heel right. We lost speed during out tacks today, but after some adjustments on crew work, we got it all it settled, and our tacks were rather good. Sweeet.

2) Hoisting timing – We shuttled between the Bear and Seattle Hoist, and generally, the problem was about the timing of the hoist. After some communication, and some trial-and-error, we got the timing right.

3) Get the spin to fly. Somehow, it seemed that despite the different parameters (pole height,guy and sheet, sailing angle) being set correctly, the spin could not fly fully. Later, we discovered that adjusting the pole just higher by an inch or so, set the spin to fill well.
Overall, we had a good training, settling some issues, working out movements on the boat, and evaluating the currents, winds off Ocean Marina.

Check out the pics in the following entry for more info!