#melges – So the Embarr team is back on the water with a new boat writes skipper Conor Clarke. Those of you who have followed us in the past will be familiar with the old Red Rocket which we sailed to a few decent results, well she is now in Australia and we hear won her first regatta with a series of bullets. No pressure! The new boat is pure white, not as easy to spot in pics but should (had better!) be stiffer and quicker. We will see!
Truth is we had her out in Chicago a few weeks ago and spent a lot of time re-working settings and trying to optimise and learn. Boring stuff but has to be done.
Today, in San Francisco, we sailed out to the Golden Gate but we decided not to go out under it because that whole area of the bay was completely blocked out by fog, thick fog that lives even in 25 knots of breeze. Bizarre and especially when, about 5 miles away, in our host San Francisco Yacht Club, it was sunny, warm with a light breeze. This is a weird place for weather.
Anyway, we went out with the Bermudans on Hedgehog to line up against them and practice. They are an excellent team, we were lucky to beat them into fourth overall on the last day of the Worlds in Corpus, they are very slick boat handlers and very fast on all points.
We had some fantastic downwind blasts with them then some gut thumping upwind slogs as well. Some other boats joined in too later in the afternoon. We practiced our manoeuvres and played with sails and settings all day. We had GoPros on board so maybe we can show some video clips when we have them edited, some of the sound won't be fit for public consumption though, sorry. There's a practice race tomorrow and the Pacific Coast Championships start properly on Saturday. It's cold and windy so it will be fast and wet. Emotional too as always on Embarr, even working the Velocitek had its dramas with us today, imagine when we start actually racing! I hope the GoPros caught some of the domestics!
We will keep you updated here on Afloat.ie and post some pics and maybe even videos, we promise to try to keep it interesting too.
The Embarr team is Nathan Wilmot, Dave Hughes, Maurice / Prof O'Connell, Kate Sheahan, and Conor Clarke
