Lake Erie Districts - 2007
Cleveland Yachting Club

The Lake Erie District as some really cool spots to sail, CYC being one of them. Situated on a small island in the middle of the Rocky River, it is easy to get in/out to Lake Erie for some great sailing.

For the Quantum Team, this years event provided the perfect "test" to getting 1049 up to speed and we used every opportunity to tune and fine-tune.

The racing on Saturday started out perfect. Nice waves, nice wind and a good "open water" speed test with small-ish wind shifts. Throughout the day, however, the breeze tapered off and the light and lump set in.

Kyle Finefrock was on fire. He didn't make many mistakes and took advantage of some good opportunities and capitalized. Kyle had Ben Mercer and Sarah Paisley on board to help him....they sailed great! Ernie Dieball made his LE District debut in 3995 with Mike Stark and Rick Rothenbuhler and finished an impressive 2nd. Their speed was a good benchmark for my team (Karl Felger and Ryanne Gallangher) to test 1049.

We had our ups and downs, but used this great event to learn. And learn we did.

We found out that we were on pace when the wind was up and mast loaded. When the wind died down below 10 knots, we felt good on port tack, but really bad on starboard tack. As the day progressed our observations were heightened.

We got back on to the dock with a 6, 17, 10, which wasn't what we had planned on. The 17 was due mainly to a main halyard problem at the start (main was down in the boat at the gun!) and the 10 was probably better than we deserved due to the misfortunes of many rounding the wrong mark.

Once on shore, we check all settings. Our rake was spot on with the tuning numbers, but we noticed that the boom was much higher. So we raked back 2". We measured diamonds and found that one side was much tighter than the other....odd because when I tuned the mast in the comfort of the sail loft, it seemed symmetric. So, we popped off all the diamonds and the mast was bent slightly in a reverse "C". This all correlated with our on-the-water observations. Fortunately for us CYC has a few trees that have been used for many-a-mast. It took us 10 minutes to get it straight, tuned and back on the boat.

Interestingly too, we found that our mast step was higher in one corner than the other, forcing the mast to "load" differently from one tack to the other. We filed the mast step and got it right.

Sunday brought great speed and better scores for 1049. Still not perfect, but again great opportunities to test, tune and experiment against many of the best sailors in the class.

We had an amazing weekend of fun and learning at CYC. Thanks to them and to the LE District sailors for their hard work in making Districts a good time.