Busy Weekend

What a weekend! Feels like the sailing season has finally started.

Saturday was Dave Dellenbaugh's presentation on Top Ten Tactical Tips. Actually as Dave said it should really have been called Top Ten Strategical and Tactical Tips but that's not such a snappy title. He covered a lot of ground in a couple of hours and had a clear, straightforward way of communicating complex topics. Chatting to a few of the other attendees afterwards we agreed that we hadn't heard much new material. After all most of what there is to say on this topic has been said or written before. There are no magic secrets. But it was good to have an early season refresher course and, on some points, Dave had a different way of explaining something or a novel way of looking at it which was more than worth the entry fee. Come to think of it there was no entry fee. And there was free rum. Thank you Mount Gay. Definitely some bloggable stuff here for later in the week.

Then on Sunday it was Laser frostbiting. 49 boats. Sunny. Over 60 degrees. 10-15 knots gusting to 20 out of the NW. Every week I think frostbiting just can't get any better -- then it does. Had some good races. Tried to work on some of the things I talked about in Awareness - with partial success. Also learned something about physical fitness and preparation. Definitely more bloggable stuff here.

After racing it was chilling out in the sunshine at the yacht club for a while and then inside for the seminar by Steve Cockerill, the Boat Whisperer. I've watched his DVDs and there wasn't much new material in his lecture that wasn't also in the DVDs. Except for one section that Steve said had been dropped from the DVDs for the sake of political correctness. Presumably because of the discussion about "bums" (Steve is English) and "pelvic thrusts". But it was all quite innocent really. In any case, there's something about learning a topic from a live speaker as opposed to a computer or TV. At least Harvard and Yale and MIT and all those other institutions that charge $40k a year for live instruction had better hope so.
The Boat Whisperer has some different ways for dealing with some common boat-handling issues which are definitely bloggable.

I arrived home on Sunday evening feeling satisfied after a weekend filled with yachtie learning experiences of various sorts, exhausted too -- and today, Monday, is definitely a time for recovery, post-race analysis and for catching up on some of the various April Fool jokes that other sailing bloggers tried to pull. Did you spot them all or were you fooled?

And talking of bloggable subjects, sooner or later we are going to return to the subject of physics and how sails work. Bonnie at frogma has been impressed by you, yes you, my three faithful readers. She says "Tillerman (and his incredibly well-informed commenters) have been geeking out ...... on the physics-of-sails topic". So sometime soon I will post some more rambling on sucking and blowing and Bernoulli and Newton and Gentry and flying upside down and other impossible tricks so you can post some "incredibly well-informed" and erudite comments in reply.