Well, with goals being the flavour of the bloog month I guess posting my nationals goals is the thing to do.
I didn't achieve my one goal, finishing higher than mid fleet. There are no real excuses, I just wasn't good enough to get there. Don't get me wrong though, I was quite happy with the regatta, it was a great venue, good competition, good new friends and strengthened old friendships...but I didn't get my goal.
Let's break it down, starting with the good points.
Good
Boat handling, mainly gybing (relative to the others around me)
Downwind speed (relative)
Downwind tactics (relative)
Was picking my way down the gusts quite well, which is surprising for an ex river heron sailor.
Finishing all laps in a few races
Finished all races I started
I consistently picked up places downwind because of the above good points. This was a revelation because in the few group races we did in Queensland I always felt slow and couldn't maintain depth downwind.
Bad
Starts
Cannot be on second row and expect to finish well without exceptional speed, tactics and a bit of luck. The few races I got away reasonably well off the start line the better the result.
Upwind VMG
Can't point, can't keep pace
This was atrocious and I can't pinpoint any one solution that will fix it.
Lee helm was present at suitable heel angles.
Sail is probably flogged and mast is soft (low leach tension)
Mainfoil is "ok" but probably needs to be replaced and/or shifted forward
I need to hike harder, longer. (Although was much better than at Mornington, I could atleast walk properly the day after a big day on the water.)
Fitness
4 races a day was a killer (Definitely improved since Mornington though.)
Strength
Arms and hip flexors were flogged after the first race each day.
Had been doing gym and pilates to improve these for most of the year. Definite improvements but still not good enough.
Boat prep (minor issue)
Dyform side stay had busted a couple of wires at the chain plate and I noticed it just prior to launching on day 3. Probably would've been fine but decided to jury rig a Pearson spare to fit my boat and got on the water for the last 2 races of the day. Once I made it to the start line the wind and waves were fairly big. There was a bit of carnage amongst the fleet and I didn't really want to risk the rest of the regatta for 2 races, so headed back in to replace the stay properly (fine, I got the wimpies). Shout-out to Toowoomba Tom for the materials and help with the new stay.
Generally my boat has stuck together quite well. I haven't really broken much on the boat since purchase, except for a ripped out gantry pintle tube which was easy to repair. I'll take the stay issue as a general maintenance lesson.
Next year Queensland is hosting the nationals at Yeppoon so I want to put in a good performance on "home waters". Items to improve in some sort of order:
Skipper
Strength (arms, hiking)
Fitness
Starts (just fucking get in there!)
Boat
Fix minor issues
New stays
New tramps
Improve upwind performance
Polish foils
Stiffen mast and/or new mast
New sail
Move cb case forward after exhausting all other avenues
Improve downwind speed
Hopefully the foil and rig mods take care of this.
Pimpin' once above items are improved (not till after Yeppoon nats)
New main foil and control system
Pimp existing hull
Consider new hull with existing bolt-ons.
Also got to fit in work, getting married and whatever other surprises get thrown my way sometime this year. Looks like it is going to be hectic!
Congratulations to the homebuilders, tinkerers and oddballs, I think you make the moth class.
I took a borrowed gopro out for a quick sail on sunday. Afterwards I thought it would be cool to overlay a GPS speed. That was a rather bad idea.
I have been fighting with every night this week and final got a workable process:
1. Open GPX file in excel and calculate speed, heading, VMG etc. There is a local weather tower which I have used for calculating/displaying TWA, AWA, AWS. I think these calculations are wrong in this video. Speed and heading were calculated with Vincenty formula for distance between two Latitude/Longitude points. Other calculations are discussed elsewhere.
2. Model a dashboard with text etc in rhino. I used text objects for everything that looks like text. The needles are blocks that can be transformed up and down or around the circle.
3. Create a rhino script that reads the excel data and modifies the text and blocks. You also need to decide on a frame rate. As the gps data logs at around 1 second and you need to render at a higher frame rate, you need to interpolate between the recorded times. Interpolating headings is irritating around 360 degrees.
4. Render each frame in sequence. The rhino script rendered and named the images for the sequence. Some important settings - make a green background so it can be green-screened over the sailing video. Make sure the text is added to render. Set the render size to the same as the sailing video size (my case, 1280x720). This finishes with thousands of renders labled 0.jpg to 1500.jpg (or whatever)
5. Virtual Dub can be used to render all of these frames to a single AVI file. Remember to set the frame rate. While my video was shot at 30FPS, I rendered the dashboard at 5 FPS to save on rendering time. At this stage set virtual dub to 5 FPS.
6. Open the gopro video and the dashboard video in Wax 2.0 and use the Chroma Key filteras described by this annoying kid. I needed to convert my gopro video to AVI in Virtual Dub also as Wax appears to be limited in the formats it can open. The gopro and dashboard need to by synced manually at this stage.
7. Final edits, music and text were done in Windows Live Movie Maker, because Wax is very clunky.
I say it was a bad idea cause I have had a horrible time with the video softwares. To get to this point I have downloaded 20 programs/codecs and learnt Lightworks only to find it wouldn't encode my video. Struggles with formats etc and colossal files (like a 5min blank with that was 12 gig!). Virtual Dub is gold, and it looks like a good idea to keep everything as an AVI file as early and as long as possible.
Syncing the boat video with the dash video was tricky and inaccurate. Next time I will walk between some known points holding the camera close to the GPS. Like up and down a few marina fingers.
If anyone else is interested leave a comment below and I'll tidy up the excel and rhinoscript files then provide links.
All done, I accomplished my goal - boat and I finish every race and i beat a pleasing number of M2s and BRs. I can say I have doubled my pace around the course relative to the front runners since last year, now finishing two laps in the time the leaders are doing three. My final result was 53rd out of 69 winning me the prize of 'lowest place who finishing every heat'. This won me a zhik shirt and gloves.
Goals for next year - get onto the third lap sailing on my own design/build foils.
Immediate boat work - bin the tension system, service the tiller mechanism, carbon spreaders and new tramps.
Nick finished 50th consistently beating me by up to 3-7 places but was dragged back down after suffering a bout of the whimpies on day 3. I'll let him pick his own goals and put his photos in a separate post.
Some photos below. More photos here. Full results here.
sensational conditions for day 1 - flat and 10-15kts. don't know who won - there was too much rum and if you are reading this, it's probably not for the results.
as the n4rks mentioned, i spent the evening of day 0 rebuilding both foils but managed to get onto the course on time. In the middle of the first of three races i tore thru the middle of my stbd tramp making a great big diagonal chasm between the 380mm wide hull and the wing bar. then one air bag deflated and the other escaped - tacking became really dicey and gybing worse. rerighting after a capsize was not pleasant as there was nowhere to put your bodyweight to keep the boat upright and no air bags to help keep it stable. it was fine once i managed to get onto the wing and get the ship up to speed tho, and i persisted and logged finishes in all races even beating a few more boats than usual.
nick had a better day. we just had a look at his gps tracks. nice angles upwind and down. he was picking up boats all over the place downwind as he gybed to stay in the gusts while others feared the gybe. a bit of extra gearing may have also helped downwind but the waves weren't much of a test.
i did the ring around after the race to find a local sail maker and he did a wicked repair overnight. the tramps are looking better than ever. i was looking forward to an early night but helped Robla glue his tiller back onto his BR rudder box.
day 2 saw some 'not usually like this' conditions -and the locals probably had a point. a 40deg heatwave with 10-30kt westerlies that with the direction warbling all over the place. So the race organisers decided to have the layday early and scheduled the 'dash for cash' and AGM and no other racing. we lined the shore in the shade of some of the trees and watched 12 elite sailors sail a short course close to the bank, progressively eliminating sailors until Peter Burling, Scott Babbagge, Nathan and Joe Turner were left. The wind went bonkers - huge lulls surrounded by 20kt bullets that took its toll on all but Peter who took it out.
i know we should be taking more photos but we did get this one:
when you fall asleep at the AGM, the next nationals venue ends up being 2000km away - queensland will be hosting it at keppel bay, yeppoon.
