Spring Series Sails Talk
Race 4 - April 2nd 2000
With a breeze of between 8-14 knots competitors in Race 4 enjoyed some excellent racing. For the IR2000 classes the race officers took advantage of the breeze to set a course comprising of long beats followed by challenging reaches and the occasional run.
Warlord scored another victory in IRM, by over four minutes on corrected time from 2XL. IRC 1 went to Aera who beat Desperado by nearly two minutes.
In IRC 2 Dave Scanlan's Fandango joined the three First 40.7s from last week. On her first outing of the year Fandango showed excellent speed with her full suit of Banks Sails to beat her sisterships and score a fourth in IRC 2.
Wing and a Prayer - Photo Thornycroft. 01983 290220 or check out www.yacht-photos.co.uk for pictures of your boat.
How do you tell how much better your new sails are than your old ones? We asked Alan Davis from Technical Sales at B&G to help:
"The only practical method of measuring the performance of your boat is using the instruments. They will tell you the boat speeds and wind angles achieved with both the old and new sails - this is the good news! The bad news, however, is that most systems are not actually accurate enough to provide useful data. The obvious way around this is to buy the best instruments available and ensure that you calibrate them carefully. Remember however that a cheap, well calibrated set of instruments is better than an expensive uncalibrated set; but they do have big limitations.
As a starting point you must carefully calibrate the main functions of the system: Boat Speed, Depth, Apparent Wind Angle and Heading. Once these are done, any further calculated functions, like True Wind Speed, will be as accurate as possible.
Take note that only the very best instruments have the ability to individually calibrate True Wind functions and any instruments without this ability will not give you accurate data. In this case, do not trust the figures given by the True Wind functions as these are badly affected by effects such as the distortion of airflow around the rig, known as upwash. These can only be corrected through calibration.
In summary, spend time calibrating your instruments and know their limitations. Then calibrate some more!"
You can contact Alan via email on alan@bandg.co.uk.
Greek Judel/Vrolijk 43 - Ellinis
SPRING SERIES OFFER
Don't forget that you can still take advantage of our offer of a 15% discount off all new sail orders for Spring Series competitors until April 30th.
Order placed by April 7th will be despatched before Easter.
So if you have been considering a new sail now is the time to give us a call!
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