Sunday, June 8, 2014

Answers

Time to give you answers for the questions I raised in my last post. The first question was why I often find myself using an undergrip with the back hand in duck jibes:
A few more pictures give hints:
This is a bit earlier in a duck jibe. I did not grab back far enough on the old side, so I cannot throw the sail - you can see it is touching my right arm. That happened in a lot of duck jibes. The sail I am jibing is a 6.5 with a 198 cm boom, so the hands really have to move back a lot - not just 4 or 6 inches.
Without a sail throw, the mast is still almost in the water, and the boom is pointing up:

So when I switch hands on the new side, the under grip is more natural.

Here's an image how things should look like with a proper throw:

The sail is more upright and still moving towards the clew. I can grab the new side before the harness lines with the front hand, and the back hand can grab with an over grip without any problems.

Now on to the Carve 360:
Every time I do Carve 360s after not doing them for a few weeks, I have to go through all the same mistakes I made when learning them. In lighter wind, that typically starts with lying the sail down too much, and then falling onto the sail. The other very typical crash is being thrown backwards when the sail powers up backwinded - that's what happened next. This crash has two common reason: not moving the sail back far enough, and getting the weight onto the heel so the leeward rail goes into the water. In the picture, you can see that my front hand is close to the harness line. That's a clear indicator that I did not move the sail back far enough. If you slide both hands forward, the front hand all the way to the mast, it's much easier to have the sail back far enough. The way I have it, the "bull horns" (harness line attachment points) are still right in front of my body, so the the bull gets me when the sail gets power.

The other problem visible on the picture above is that my back knee is not bent much, and my hips are not inwards. I'm still carving in the picture, but as soon as the sail powers up, it will push me onto my heel. That digs the leeward rail in, which (almost) always ends leeside sailing. But while my stance is not great, the first problem is the bigger one - with the sail all the way back towards the tail of the board, there still would have been a chance to finish this 360.