Commodore's Cup Race

Starting Line

I'm a little behind here, but a few weeks ago we joined a number of our fellow SCYC members for the annual Commodore's Cup Race.  Like all the very best races, this one was really an excuse to have a nice sail followed by an awesome party.

The Commodore decided that the format would be a pursuit race and our rating put us as second fastest boat in the fleet. It was quite relaxing starting a race without anyone around and allowed us to hit the line with full speed on port tack headed to the nearly-always favored right side of the race course.  Like many places along the California coast, the fast path upwind is to sail in on port until you nearly bump into North America and then tack out.

These are the first pictures of S'agapo with her new suit of sails.  The North 3Di looks much darker here when photographed looking toward the sun, but they are certainly gray.  The amazing thing about this sail cloth is the near complete lack of stretch.  The sail sets as it was designed and tugging and pulling on strings doesn't change its shape much at all.  You'll also notice that we have increased the dimensions of the main with a larger roach and full length along the luff and foot.  The jib is similarly increased in size to the maximum that will fit along the luff with the leach reaching the spreaders.

Fading wind near the Leeward Mark

In addition to the new up-wind sails we've added a larger symentrical spinnaker.  The original spinnaker pole was 10.3', the size of the "J" for S'agapo.  In races last winter it became quite clear that the boat could take advantage of a lot more sail area downwind and we turned to Larry Tuttle at Water Rat to extend our carbon spinnaker pole to 14.8' and to Dave Hodges at Santa Cruz Sails to build a new spinnaker that was cut for the significantly longer pole.  Both of these modifications turned out quite well.  The final step was to have Rocky build us some nice teak chocks to hold the pole on deck.

We had a few concerns about increasing the spinnaker size this much, that the boat might have difficulty with control in high winds, but no problems have emerged.  We have yet to have an opportunity to really press her, but it looks like she's quite stable downwind.  Our first serious test will be the Double Angle and Windjammer's races coming up in late August.  Typically, the Windjammer sees wind speed well over 30 knots and we'll know by the end of that race if we've over sized the chute.

Lap Two

With the new sails came a trimming learning curve.  Fortunately, Trevor Baylis and his daughter, our Squirrel, came along and taught the rest of us a great deal about setting sails made from this new material. You can see Squirrel lounging on Stacey's Beach in the picture of us sailing downwind above.  The aft deck just seems to do that to the ladies, they all love it.

In the first beat we showed good speed and point and were extremely pleased with how S'agapo moved along with the new sails.  Our benchmark was the lower rated Sydney-38 Animal with which we could point and hold off.  We continued to show speed roughly the same as Animal until the second beat when we were decidedly slower.  The general consensus was that we'd picked up some kelp, but I'm blaming it on my poor sailing.  Kelp is just too easy a way out.  That said, we are moving closer and closer to deciding to put in a kelp cutter.

In the end we finished in the top quarter of the fleet, had a great time and headed back in for the party.  There is clearly a lot more speed in S'agpao that I haven't been able to tap into consistently.  More time at the helm and working on repeatable trim is required.  Downwind we're fine but upwind we continue to have bursts of impressive speed mixed in with extended periods of doing well but not great.

A special thanks to Trevor, Squirrel, Charlie, Synthia, and Peter for doing a great job as crew.