Team Seacats

This weekend was a good opportunity for several of us to get out the F18s and do some tuning and experimenting with setups. Four of us gathered at the Lake Keowee Sailing Club (my home club) and had some really nice breeze on Saturday. The breeze peaked at about 14 knots and gradually started to die by the end of the day. I single handed for the first two races because my crew wasn’t able to arrive on time. I found the boat to be pretty overpowered with just me on board in that breeze but I was able to hang in there with the fleet. After Tim Owens jumped on board with me, we were able to get competitive. Unfortunately, I was quite rusty with handling the boat around a closed course. My tacks were pretty bad, I wasn’t being terribly smooth, and I actually fell off the boat once by not quite hooking in the trapeze harness all the way. Fortunately, I was able to hang on to the mainsheet (which almost made the boat capsize as my ‘body surfing’ with the mainsheet, sheeted in the main sail even more) and Tim was quick to grab the tiller and I was able to climb back to the boat and get onboard without loosing too much.

We then spent an evening grilling and swimming at Rick Harper’s house and then went at it again on Sunday. We switched up some boats on Sunday to get a feel for what other people were doing. The air was pretty light and fluky but still was a good time. I felt like this weekend was really good to help me get back into course racing mode. Click on the following image to go to the flikr site where there are some more photos.

Originally uploaded by Team Seacats.