Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines

I have decided to re-start blogging as I am now not so thoroughly depressed about the whole sailing malarky. For a long time (since November) I have been sailing a choreographed routine to the song which is the title of this post. i.e. I go up tiddly up up then down tiddly own down (very quickly and probably injure something on the shroud on my way past). 

   Ventilation has been the issue. I stupidly hit the bottom of chichester harbour in october and managed to get the main foil repaired when perhaps it should have been left for dead. Having limited funding, this was the only option. The finish and shape of the repaired foil is not what it once was and is an excellent promoter of the aforementioned problem. Despite weeks spent sanding the thing back and fairing It will not go away. 

   Enter Rod Harris and his two spare foils. Out of the kindness of his heart Rod let me borrow one of his foils to use on Sunday of the HISC regatta. I was extatic to find out that not only can I still sail but that my boat is actually quite fast. I have had no indication of what it is capable of since I got the boat and have been fannying around doing bits and bobs that I thought might work only to spend most of my time swimming around cursing the main foil. Anyway Rod being the legend he is has let me borrow the foil until my lovely new Fastacraft ones arrive in June. By then I hope to be the fastest thing in the air.

Weston (re)union

I had a great days sailing at Weston on Sunday. I played around with some foil setups and seem to have increased my speed upwind judging from my GPS readouts. I also had my first pitch pole in the new boat and have found out that my self preservation instincts have developed since Weymouth. Once i realised i was going to hit the shrouds, in stead of thinking oh crap...ok, as well as thinking oh crap, i turned so that the back of my buoyancy aid hit the shrouds and not my legs, it was genius. Next step, not hitting the shrouds in the first place! Another thing to have developed since Weymouth is my idea of what is breezy. The conditions at Weston on the weekend were what i may have described pre-Weymouth as breezy. Now its a walk in the park. Matt was also out sailing on Sunday and going well. We are starting to get the Lime's set up about right now although Matt has a long list of things he wants to do to the boat. Welcome to moth sailing, the list never gets shorter.

Tour de Force

I've been passing the evenings watching the tour de france over the past few days, it has been awesome. Pro bike riders are just incredible athletes, at times on the flat the peloton ride near to 40mph, i have only ever done that down a big hill whilst pedalling my legs off, they do it every day for 3 weeks. You may have to be fit to sail a moth, you have to be a machine to ride up alpe d'huez at just under 20mph. I'm off to the pyrenees next month to try and crawl my way up some mountains on a bike, the fitness regime for the gorge starts here!

Late update

No updates for a while since the worlds finished. I had a great time at the worlds and learnt loads about the boats. It turned out that the set up that worked so well for me at the nationals was rubbish and I ended up 32nd, partly on account of some boat issues which left me struggling around the course just to get a result. All is not lost however as last saturday I took deilivery of aircooled, my new prowler zero. It is such a step up from the lime. I was astonished how easy it was to sail and it has spurred me on for next year. I figure if i was competitive in the lime then the sky is the limit with aircooled! I'm also working on some new development stuff for the boat in my spare time. Somehow i'll have to find the money to make it to the gorge. From now on i'll try and update this thing more often too, after all to win the worlds first you need a blog!

Bored of the winds

Four days on the trot not sailing is getting to my sanity. I am now a very proficient radio control helicopter pilot, I've discovered i can eat my own weight in cake and pasta in 24 hours and the boys club band has a host of new songs, see Tom Whicher's blog. These are not the activities of someone who is not the single most bored man in the history of the Isle of Portland.

The Wind Up

Three days spent ping ponging between despair and elation. Friday the 13th hit with a vengeance, the tool i bought to make new rods disintegrated as soon as it was used in anger and then the new tramps didn't quite fit the boat. To cap it all off saturday morning dawned windless, so with all of the boat issues unsolved i decided to head off on the bike for a few hours. Once out of Soton it was great, bowling along occasionally exchanging a g'mornin with other cyclists. Only the ones on road bikes mind, mountain bikers seem to believe i'm not worth the time, or that i look stupid in lycra and so ignore my efforts to be sociable.

Today has been great though, i rigged up looking out at a dead calm Southampton water and ever the optimist I went out and floated for a bit. Then, bang. 12 knots just blew in from nowhere and foiling tack practice was on. I must have done 300+ tacks during the session. One of them was what people seem to now be calling a fack. Obviously now the definition has been muddied and you are allowed to touch down i might be able to claim a few more but there was definitely one where everything stayed loaded up and i just skimmed the surface before climbing back up onto the foils. Awesome.

Blogging?

Well I’ve managed to resist starting a blog for longer than most. It’s now almost a year since I first went mothing and at no point have I felt the need to post any information about the experience on the internet. To be honest my initial reaction to blogging echoed the sentiments of Si Propper on the UK website “Today it seems everyone is so fascinated with himself that he imagines the rest of us should be too.”
However I have since found myself wasting much of my spare time reading about the experiences of seemingly every other moth sailor on the planet so I’ve decided to give in and contribute something to that bottomless pit of information that is moth blogging. Real reason for starting a blog?.... boredom.
Anyway, sailing. I haven’t sailed since the nationals at the weekend where I managed to pull a blinder and finish third, 1 point ahead of Mr May. To say I was happy with my performance would be a huge understatement, it was fantastic to see all the hard work starting to pay off. That first foiling gybe at QMSC back in January seems a long time ago now.
This week has been dedicated to boatwork, my foils needed a bit of tlc and are currently residing in the garage ready to receive a new layer of paint. The new tramps have been fitted and I’m waiting for new control rods to come through too. They are all stainless affairs so I don’t have to fiddle about constantly replacing the old brass end fittings. The forecast for the weekend looks a bit dodgy though. I might end up traveling to Hayling to sail with the guys there as I fear I might be staring out at a glassy Southampton water come Saturday morning!


Me at the Grafham open back in March. I seem to be the master of the dramatic crash and incredible recovery . I sailed out of this one in between races in grafham and did basically the same thing but at 18 knots down the reach at Weymouth. I sailed away to cheers from the two boats just behind me!