Jason AUS

Actually, the Noumea Race that kicks off on June 2nd has more entries than the Gold Coast race....

It's only slightly more expensive than the Paper Tiger I've been eyeballing....

Comes with them - it's the Category 1 performance upgrade for seasick sailors... "sit under a...."

She's always been reasonably quick, and with smart naviguessing can still pull a pickle dish every now and then. But... when the newer boats like Balance/Quest, Celestial, Envy Scooters and Ichi Ban are all running square top mains and Rags has a pin head, that's an obvious place to start looking for performance upgrades. So $25k for a main, plus $20k for a pair of new backstays and new strops and blocks on the transom? And with the new Hooligan having just landed (loving the wicked green keel bulb), the competition for best regatta boat will see Ichi Ban and Hooligan beating six kinds of shit out of each other - so this would be a very decent distance offshore boat, rather than a serious contender for short course "leave your wallet on the dock" racing.

Teaky can't come to the phone right now, but he bids $50,100....

Do it PIL.... do it....

https://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/001199.html This is my go-to recipe for dough. I always rest overnight in the fridge, and the taste of the dough makes it worth the wait. I find that I get 4 decent pizzas from this recipe, rather than 6 baby dough balls. We've got a backyard wood fired oven from the good folks at Jumbuck. I spent $600 Aussie pesos on it as my "proof of concept" to help me decide on whether or not I build a true stone oven that will be big enough to hold a whole lamb. This oven is long enough, but being tunnel shaped it's a little narrow. I typically run my oven at between 700-750 degrees F, which reduces the cooking time for a 9 inch pizza to about 2 minutes. To get to that temp I need 4 decent sized logs, half an hour to heat the oven and can cook for 2 hours without needing to re-stock the timber.

You've got to rest your dough overnight.

Cool, thanks for the correction.

Tuffy had one, and it was a winner in the lighter air Asian circuit with a few tweaks and a dedicated, consistent crew. But this was a decade ago. It was 95% round the buoys racing though, and she was very well cared for. I'm sure one or two of the crew will pop up in due course and correct me but from what I recall she had a keel mod and a small bowsprit as part of the tweaks. She was sailing in a mixed fleet of similar sized boats, and in that era displacement mode W/L racing was still all the rage. There was another 40 (Bull ?) owned by another forum member that had been turboed, prepped and campaigned in a Transpac race. IIRC, the results were not as spectacular as had been hoped for as compared to your average downhill Transpac sled the Sydney 40 is a little... robust. A couple of the Admiral's Cup fleet ended up as charter boats and they're still popping up for sale every 2 or so years, having been ridden hard and put away wet. Being a boat with a bit of vintage about it, that has no doubt contributed to the wet core problem normally caused by fittings and blocks being replaced over time (and not necessarily resealed properly). The moulds for the 40 had the aft 18 inches blocked off and that was the genesis of the Sydney 38 hull, but the Sydney 41 was the original and isn't related to the 40 - except by marriage. Which is a pity, as the 41 is a sweet little boat for what is now a 20+ year old design. If you're after a displacement mode boat to sail W/L racing the 40 is not the worst boat you could buy, but it won't ever be a "they never saw me coming" rating bandit. You'll have to dial in the rig, and be pulling all of the old school IMS tricks like easing the rig forward over the bow downwind and basically playing "check on / check off" upwind. Just watch how far forward you ease the rig - I know some guys who did that in a breezy downwind leg and the rig promptly disappeared over the bow, where they just as promptly ran over it at somewhere north of 15 knots.... I'm not (and have never been) the Sydney 40's biggest fan, but if the comparison is something like a Summit 40 - at least the Sydney 40 has already celebrated it's fifteenth birthday while the Summit at times felt like it'd struggle to make it to five! And as I've said before in regards to Sydney yachts, have your surveyor check the rudder bearings backwards and forwards, inside and out.

Q: How do you know that the girl you're with is enjoying your company? A: When you stick your hand down her pants it feels like you're feeding a horse...

She came onto me, I swear it!!

Regardless of the seasonal discounts, what I'd heard from a North salesman is that when they put a quote together their pricing matrix is common across all lofts worldwide, so it has so much historical data in it that it calculates everything - right down to the length of material needed to make a jib bag, and how many ties go around that bag. So if you're trying to be a hard ass and demand a better price on a sail, the system will cheerfully reduce the number of ties on your #2 jib bag from 6 to 3 - which can be a real problem if you're buying sails for a maxi and they weigh a couple of hundred pounds each. So if you're buying a full wardrobe of sails, then you're more likely to get a few free North bags and belts rather than a reduced price or fewer bag ties. But they will also make sure that you get good support from the loft, which is a good value add. And of course, it's much harder for the competition to get on board a good boat when one of the jib trimmers is "Trevor, from North... he manages our sail program and bangs my daughter." The downside is that if your daughter stops banging Trevor, he's the one who knows if that new #2 jib is in the forepeak, or the container, or at the loft getting a new luff curve, or buried under the A1.5 in the team van, or in your boatshed...

He's a little bit older... A little bit wiser... And a lot greyer. To his Royal Highness, the most exalted ruler and supreme Commander of the Navy of Tuvalu - may your majesty live to celebrate 40 more birthdays!

This was actually covered in an Australian Sailing conference I attended last year. Volunteers should be (and are) praised, supported and promoted but if the club is applying to host a world championship event (or a World Cup as the original poster mentioned) then competitors who are spending their own money to fly in from overseas, transport boats, hire accommodation etc. expect world class facilities and a world class race committee. Some Aussie clubs have an IRO on the team who can co-ordinate the on water component of the event, but most have (still very good) state or national level RO's. There was an example given of a club a few years ago who hosted a worlds with their own local RO's and a course change signal wasn't properly made as no one had thought to check the hooter on the mark boat worked... so there were requests for redress, protests flying left right and centre and after several levels of appeals and re-hearings the final results were reversed in the room some months later. IIRC a truly world class sailor gave the sport away as it was such a shitfight and so poorly handled. As a result, whenever that club now applies to any class to host a top flight regatta they are politely excused very early in the running as while they want sailors to come in from overseas and contribute $100k to the local economy, no one can remember to go down to the chandlery and pick up a $3 gas cannister. The message was really that you should have a succession plan in place for your RO team, and empower your own members and volunteers to prepare for these opportunities when they come up - if you are lucky enough to have an IRO on hand you need to nurture and develop your other volunteers and help bring them up to the international standard through training, forums, process mapping, checklists, time on water etc. and that by helping your volunteers to become the best volunteers possible you attract the best events and sailors to your club.