F16 Europeans: Sunday practice race

Report By Gill de Bruyne, BEL 666, FalconF16 (leading the fleet in photo above)
“Sun, water, wind, nice sceneries. That is Como, Italy in a nutshell. A great place for the first F16 Europeans. We arrived on Thursday, a few days before the actual regatta that starts on Monday. We had the boat measured on Friday morning. After that we set it up, adjusted some things we already wanted to do long time, but hadn’t have the time for, and then set off for the first short sail.
Damn, what a great lake! From 1 pm onwards the wind starts to blow Southernly (Nothernly in the morning) untill about 6 pm. When we went on the water it was about 15 knots and a great ride with the spinnaker. Also the wind and water is so hot you only need a shorty and that is still too warm at some times! 🙂
Same thing on Saturday! That looked promising for the rest of the week and the championship!
Saturday most of the teams arrived and we could meet up with some familiar faces we hadn’t seen for a long time.

Sunday
Today we did our first race, the practice race. In fact it was held together with a local regatta.
2 small races were done today, with only 5 boats on the starting line the first race. Us and 4 Viper teams. The wind was blowing Northernly the whole day because a storm hit us last night and this caused very shifty wind and a lot of dead spots during the race.

This race we finished 4th, with Darren Bundock and Carolijn Brouwer having a huge lead of the rest of us.
The second race of the day most of the F16’s were out on the water. (I think we are about 17 in total). We positioned ourselves quite late for the start, but found a hole 4 boats from the committee boat. We had a great start and got clean air immediately.
We tacked quite early and got a great shift on that tack. The whole fleet turned to early to the upwind mark and had to do 2 more tacks, while we sailed into more wind by going further.
This got us first to the upwind mark.
We could keep our position up to the downwind mark as we did a great thing looking for pressure again.
We continued to keep our lead second time at the upwind mark, but a group of 5 boats had gained a bit on us. On the second downwind we made the mistake on to gybe immediately into the pressure and got caught in a deadspot 50 meters below the upwind buoy!

We saw the group of 5 gybed immediately and sailing 50 meters higher with the hull out of the water…. (Cursing on the boat 🙂 ) By the time we got to the finish line they had overtaken us moving us to 7th…. Well at least we know we got our boatspeed right ! We didn’t manage to do another race as the wind totally died and everyone headed back to the club.
Well great first day for us, but I’m sure we’ll have to be at our very best from start to finish if we want to be at the top of the fleet.”
Photo above: Two Aqua raptors present and below the Eurocat winners, Carolijn Brouwer and Liz Wardley training, one od the crew of the strong Viper team, photo Carlo Restano.