Summer is Coming
The last 2 weekends we’ve been having a series at the club called the Seiko Series… surprise surprise, sponsored by Seiko, to help promo their new watch called Velatura. With Clynton and Joe being serious with their Olympic dreams and sailing their new boat. I’ve been able to drive the old one this series which has been very enjoyable compared to my normal crewing on the boats. I’ve done a bit of driving of the 49er in the past though nothing more extended than a single Sunday sail.
I had some trouble getting a crew, my brother was busy, Scott has the 18’s starting shortly so they’ve been doing some training and I’ve been having a long slow healing process from when I hurt my wrist ice skating for my birthday a few weeks back so I was a bit cautious of crewing for Scott. Fortunately I was able to get Matteo to come sailing with me, it was his second ride on a 49er (I took him for his first a year or 2 ago) so as you can imagine with me not having a lot of experience driving a 49er and Matteo’s lack of crewing experience we weren’t going to set the world on fire. We were pretty well aware of this and took the have fun approach, even still it’s pretty frustrating towards the back of the bunch. We’ve been slowly improving and last race today we managed to be relatively competitive holding off most of the boats behind and not being too far behind Clynton/Joe and Dave/Gooby to finish 4th.
Next weekend is a weekend off then another 2 sundays of racing to see who wins the watch. Hopefully we can keep improving and start getting some consistency at the front of group B before the boat is sold.
Seems I can’t post without taking a dig at something… Why is it that the Yachting Timer watches are useless when it comes to actually using them for proper sailing? This is not specific to Velatura… Rolex and every other so called yachting timer is just a bunch of dials. Now would I so no to one? nope, my mobile is my watch at the moment which probably partly explains our ordinary starts 
Filed by Popeye at September 23rd, 2007 under Sailing