Watching Gordon gain on me downwind every race at Whiskeytown (and overhaul me twice) made my Weta weakness pretty clear--I'm sleepy-dog-slow downwind. Up until this point, I've been picking up tips here and there from the vets in the class and basically just winging it when it's time to put the wind abaft the beam. Some days I hang in there, others I'm clearly the slow one. My old Megabyte buddy, Dean E. (who won the Banshee fleet at Whiskeytown--nice going!) sent me a nice email the other day. He noted how much fun the Weta looked and commented on how hard it must be to learn how to sail downwind after coming from the Megabyte. I hadn't really thought that much about it before, but his note really got me thinking. Maybe I was carrying over some good but now wrong habits. In the Megabyte, I'd worked hard to refine my downwind speed--had to in order to keep up with lighter weight sailors. I learned just how to optimize the vang, how to trim the boat for zero helm pressure (no brakes), how to feel just the right mainsail trim--how to rip down a lake dead downwind. The Weta on the other hand doesn't even have a vang, has two extra hulls with three sails to trim, and it definitely don't do dead downwind.
With the West Coast Championships coming up in two weeks (at the SF NOOD), I figured I'd better figure this out. Armed with some tips gleaned from catamaran sailors, I set off for some practice in the Carquinez Strait. Without a benchmark available, I can't say whether any of it worked, but I can say that I gained greater awareness of how the helm, sails, and wind angles interact. Awareness is good. It's a first step to identifying and dropping old habits and discovering new ones.
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