That's Bart on the left, me in the middle, and Dean on the right. Here's a picture of our playground, taken from the hill where we parked:
Bart ready to go out:
That's Nina's 5.0 Loft Racing Blade he is using. Nina sailed for about an hour before Bart came, but could not get dialed in quite right in the gusty conditions, and decided to take pictures instead. Bart was happy to use her sail, and never finished rigging his own.
Dean had some fun, too:
Once he remembered that this was supposed to be a speed session, he stuck to the water a bit better:
Dean's 2 second top speed was 36.25 knots - that's darn fast! But Bart was flying fast, too:
This is what Bart looked like when he checked his GPS after the best run of the day:
He had 38 knots on his GPS - plenty of reason to be happy! That's a full three knots faster than his previous best, and the fastest GPS speed in New England that I have ever seen. He was quite willing to share the excitement, and tell us where he had hit his top speed:
Later analysis showed that the 38 knots were an artifact; Bart's actual 2 second top speed was 35.77 knots. But that was still 0.7 knots faster than he had ever sailed before. Bart also improved his personal best for 5 x 10 seconds by a knot - congratulations!
He set his top speed just as the incoming tide had started to cover the islands in the bay - the wind had gotten a lot steadier then, and felt stronger than before. My GPS tracks show that the slicks got faster as the tide came in:
I barely broke 30 knots in the first few runs, but later had five runs with a 2-second top speed above 34 knots. The max speed the GPS showed was 35.66 knots, which is cool.. except that recording at 5 Hz is likely to add some little speed artifacts, and my 1 second top speed was just below 35. Still, I set two new personal records for 2 seconds and 5 x 10 second speeds - great! I also was just about 1.4 knots slower than Dean, which is a big improvement over the usual 3 to 5 knots that I'm slower. The Loft Racing Blade 5.6 I used today for the first time certainly is one reason I was able to narrow the gap - great sail! But maybe Nina had the 5.0 that Bart used rigged a bit better :-).
This was our third day of small-sail sailing in a row, after overpowered sessions on 4.7/5.0 at Pleasant Bay 2 days ago, and 3.7/4.0 at Chapin yesterday morning. Those were fun, but I certainly liked today's session the most!
