Car Ramrod

Sounds like you are well place to comment on the boat that ran into a bell buoy in the middle of a fairway....

With the year that sailing has had in regards to safety, it might be considered to be in poor taste to bemoan raising safety standards and I invite you to tell the widow of John Fisher that the sport is "basically as safe as golf." It's in doubly poor taste when the your inability to race was 100% self-inflicted by not reading the race instructions in time to attend the safety at sea seminar put on by STC the week before the race. It's in triply poor taste when you vent your frustrations anonymously in a public forum and package them with baseless implications of profiteering and grifting against an organization that is the pillar of Safety Offshore in the United States. The safety concerns associated with this race are real. Jamie Boeckel was killed on this race not that long ago, it happened to a group of sailors arguably 10 times more experienced than the crew of the J/100 you were going to sail on and it haunts the members of that crew to this day. The fund established in his memory provides SAS training to Junior Sailors to prevent the kind of accident which claimed his life. I've been a man overboard and I've picked up a man overboard. In both cases, I was glad to know that there were people on the boat who had been trained and forced to practice the maneuver under the eye of instructors before. I've had a rudder failure out of sight of land and was heartened to know that the people around me were trained to, and did, get the boat back to land sailing without steerage. I've had water ingress issues onto a race boat well into the Atlantic Ocean and felt safer because the man who fixed it was in the SAS class with me. It blew over 30 knots on the back side of Block Island Friday night and it was DARK. Whether you pedantically define Rhode Island Sound as the "sea" or not, the water out there is just above 50F which, when combined with air temperatures in the low 50s and the windchill, can knock you unconscious in less than an hour. There were 70 boats transiting the area at the time and most were performing sail changes, reefing, and other maneuvers in the middle of the night - all of which carry the risk of MOB situations. When an accident can happen to anyone in that situation, why shouldn't everyone be held to some defined standard? Who are we to know that in your crew's 60+ BI races you experienced and solved every issue that is covered at a SAS seminar? To that end, there are people who do this race that are unqualified, either formally or informally, to perform in a safety crisis - period. For every Mario Andretti there are 10 first timers who don't know the quickstop maneuver. If the only way to bring at least 30% of every person on the water up to some known baseline of capability is to require they pay a safety expert a nominal fee and sit through a lecture and have a weird lunch of pale turkey sandwiches in the SUNY messhall then that's an acceptable cost to me. If there are still people who would chose not to enter and race around the same track as me or I because they don't want to get trained then I say good riddance, go do the the Figawi, because I wouldn't want my life or yours to depend on a person who wanted to save a few bucks rather than a person.

Well, which is it? A sail plan or a line drawing? You could email someone at Schock, like Sascha, rather than asking for something free here but designers tend to like being compensated for using their IP.

But...why was he naked...?

As Kevin Spacey has shown us, this might not be the best course of action

Why? Your premise is flawed because the boats are One Design. Even if you believe Dongfeng has a 1% speed advantage (which, no, they don't, otherwise they'd be 30-40 miles ahead of the fleet right now) you would see no functional difference by modeling at the .05% level which is roughly the difference they've shown so far in this leg. Might as well ask "Forss, would you add the Soviet ballistic missile submarine Red October into the routing options in the tracker? I'd like to see how the Silent Caterpillar drive does against a VO65... "

Purchased mine in the spring of 2010 and have put them through hard hard use since then. It became official this october: I pulled my right foot out and the sock was soaking wet - while the left side foot was bone dry. Guess they're starting to go. I went around with Dubarry this spring trying to see if they would resole them once the sole started to go and they refused to even try - or give me the discount that others in this thread have received. Since it seems to be a fabric issue, I'm going to look into the Gore-Tex warrantee and see if maybe there's something to be gained there. Otherwise it'll probably be another $400 of my money going to Dub because the Zhiks one make my feet sweat and the HPX ones wear out way too fast.

Someone should tell those rocks not to move. Been a bad year for it, huh?

So, if I'm seeing this right, the furler is imparting the furling torsion onto the luff of the sail? Thoughts on how this will affect sail shape with long term usage?

Careful, someone got a post deleted and their account threatened for inferring such a thing last time this topic came up.

133 is an awesome boat for everything you've put down as criteria.

That's a big word for you, was it one of your vocabulary words of the week in high school english?

What was the pile up at the boat all about at the second GR?

Onda? quantum was usually longitud cero

TIA Bru