Miami Race Week 2009 -Official repository for any information/results

[MR.CLEAN]

Clean, would part of the 'boringness' of the regatta and your fleet just lie in the fact of the numbers being so thin? If instead of 7 boats you had 15-20, with more than one of each type of boat. Packing the fleet tighter might have caused more decisions and maneuvers?

Of course it would! But with US-IRC's growth slowing way down during the recession and no other option for Miami, the writing was on the wall long before this week.

 

[doghouse]

So are you thinking of doing marblehead with Ciao this summer, Clean?

If the timing works out, absolutely. Great bunch of guys, and a comfy offshore boat that will probably enjoy reaching quite a bit.

You should do it. It's great race. And go up and ride the tidal bore while you are in NS, it's a hoot.

 

[MR.CLEAN]

Are there any annual multi-class events that have been held since last September that have MORE participants than they did last year?Are there any annual multi-class events that have seen consistently increasing numbers since 2004? If so, what are they doing right???

Great question, and we'll tackle it on the front page tonight.

 

[MR.CLEAN]

I was doing bow the the SC37 Southern Crescent this weekend and I can tell you we had a great time, even knowing from the start that we would probably correct out DFL. The build quality is excellent, which is what you expect from a boat aiming to continue the Santa Cruz Yachts heritage. Since I only go to the cockpit in between races for lunch I can't speak for its layout, but the trimmers didn't seem to have any complaints. The only annoyance I heard was the lack of a 1:1 ratio on the cabin top winches, as the kite was usually trimmed off these winches. A Harken Quattro winch would be perfect for this application, but the winch pads might be too close to the companionway for the lower drum. All the winches looked a little small, but they're the correct spec (Harken 48 power ratio) and I'm probably just used to seeing the more squat 3 speed winches of bigger boats.
The interior is really nice and definitely has the Santa Cruz feel of beautiful wood, yet it remains light and functional. One complaint is that the opening to the forepeak is too small to easily fit the packed spinnakers through and the door handle would sometimes catch a strap on the bag until we taped it. Ideally you would remove that door for racing, but with the possibility of an even worse IRC rating it's probably better for your bowman or squirrel to just tape the handle and deal with it.

We had a few issues with the boat, but that is kind of expected with a new boat at her first regatta. The rudder was far too balanced from the factory and the back of the boat was reporting lee helm issues the first day. After almost every day of racing we filed off more and more material from the rudder head in hopes of adding rake and a little feel to the helm, but it still needs improvement. Also, there have been issues with the keel lifting mechanism on this boat since its delivery and the owner is currently looking at having it re-engineered, to his displeasure. With all Santa Cruz's talk of a great lifting keel mechanism, it should be better.

Then, after racing on day 2, the prop didn't seem to be opening right, even with a fast shift from reverse to forward. 3000 rpm and we weren't really going anywhere so we continued sailing in. While taking the main down it was apparent we weren't getting propulsion, but our friends on the Sydney gave us a pull back to our slip. I hopped overboard at the dock to take a look and the thing was FUBAR'd. The blades and hub were gone, with just some shredded black rubber that I assume to be a vibration dampener which was still bolted onto the shaft. We called the factory and they were pretty confused, saying the prop shouldn't have any rubber in it, but they shipped us a new prop overnight with early am delivery. Big credit to them, we just explained the problem and they asked for our shipping address. The next morning we had a diver install it and we were on our way. From what I saw, the factory was very good about staying in contact with us and doing everything they could. Still they should stick to Bill Lee's ideology: If the boat is delivered two weeks late but perfect the owner will hate you for two weeks; if the boat is delivered on time but screwed up the owner will hate you for the boat's lifetime.

Sailing-wise the boat is really fun, especially downwind. We had no chance upwind, off the start everyone except the Sydney would roll us. The short chop would just stop the 37 while the bigger, heavier boats chugged past us uphill. The rudder issue definitely didn't help either and the boat is really steered by the sails. Coming out of a tack the keel would be a little stalled, bows down for speed, the foils would start working, and the sails would come all the way in. However, we still couldn't point with any other boat on our fleet; maybe due to sail development and the need to power through the waves. Time in the boat will improve this, she's not an easy boat to sail, especially in the conditions we had. But once we rounded the windward mark all that was behind us.

Our AP spinnaker had been upped to 145 square meters from 129, and that definitely made a difference. The new kite helped us plane down waves in the marginal surfing conditions and was worth the rating hit. The kite exploded after a bad gybe and it got caught on a spreader tip for a second. I have since put Teflon tape on all the spreader tips, as well as backstay where the main battens hit and around the inner lip of the foredeck hatch. Downwind speeds were 9-10 knots at a minimum with frequent surfs to 13-15 knots, depending on the wave. We had a perfect wave line up once and hit 18.X knots, so the sea state was definitely a limiting factor in our maximum downwind speed. Unfortunately, with this speed came extra distance sailed and our downwind gains weren't enough to pass the lead sleds going right for the mark at 9 knots. This boat needs to be sailed aggressively downwind and doing so will reward you with plenty of speed and fast is fun. Plus, as the AWA moves forward during a surf, soaking low to make better VMG is very effective, so long as the wave you're riding is big enough to keep pushing and you can get the bow up at the end of it to power over the back of the next wave. When you're in the groove the ride is great, but with the little waves it was hard to keep this up.

On a reaching leg or distance race the Santa Cruz 37 will boogie and she should go well into the 20's surfing down the California coast like her ancestors. It's obvious this boat was not designed for IRC, so racing in IRC will only cause frustration and poor results. But once you're surfing down big rollers and passing the slow, heavy boats all this will be forgotten. Whoever sails this boat to Hawaii will have a permanently attached smile. The boat is also surprisingly dry, both up and downwind. I'm sure you can shove the bow through a wave, but this is definitely an offshore design with plenty of freeboard and forward reserve buoyancy. I really hope this boat takes off, one design racing in these would be a ton of fun and really put a premium on crew work and steerage. The Santa Cruz 37 is a great design and once the final kinks are ironed out the boat will be awesome.

Thanks for the report, Ish. Nice job.

 

[SailDry]

The King 40 crew must be the best sailors, they won almost every race in their IRC class..... The SC37 got the shaft, what a bunch of BS. There is no way to beat a boat that was specifically built to a rating system.

Go back to PHRF you hack. When the SC37 is sliding down the west coast to Mexico they will have not gotten the "shaft."

 

[MR.CLEAN]

The King 40 crew must be the best sailors, they won almost every race in their IRC class..... The SC37 got the shaft, what a bunch of BS. There is no way to beat a boat that was specifically built to a rating system.

Go back to PHRF you hack.

Nice! He makes a good point, though. We had to have some MAJOR screwups to get 3rd or 4th. Plenty of small screwups meant we'd get second. An absolutely perfect race when the breeze picked up enough to overcome the King 40s power advantage was the only way we could win one. It would have been interesting to see how 5-10 knots would have played out.

 

[Jambalaya]

A 7-boat buoy race under a rule that obviously has no ability to handicap the fleet in a useful way is remarkably uninspiring for a supposed “Grand Prix.” The boats themselves - the IRC forties - are somewhat strange beasts. They are fast and comfortable upwind in moderate breeze, being fully powered up in about 12 knots and rolling through waves rather than slamming over them. They are silly downwind on a windward leeward course, with tactics largely taken out of the equation since they point almost directly at the gates once the kite is set.
It seems that finally, thanks to recession and years of declining participation without any attention to it, the SORC is well and truly dead.

May she rest in peace.

It's not IRCs fault that symmetrical cruiser racers sail like that downwind. IRC has every ability to correctly handicap that fleet and does so. As you said with more prep the A40 would probably have won. It's not IRC's fault the entry list was pathetic.

Without the M32's the event would surely have had to have been cancelled. You cannot run a regatta with so few boats, it's not a regatta but a series of twighlight races. It is a shame that what was such a great event has declined. The PR "Grand Prix" designation is a joke and their decision to un-invite classes in the past has gotten them the result it deserved.

I was doing bow the the SC37 Southern Crescent this weekend and I can tell you we had a great time, even knowing from the start that we would probably correct out DFL. ...

The Santa Cruz 37 is a great design and once the final kinks are ironed out the boat will be awesome.

Thanks for posting, very interesting

The King 40 crew must be the best sailors, they won almost every race in their IRC class..... The SC37 got the shaft, what a bunch of BS. There is no way to beat a boat that was specifically built to a rating system.

The SC37 is very far from the IRC type form for windward leeward. It shouldn't even bother racing against symetrical boats on w/l, which begs the question why are they entering. You cannot blame the rule. As noted above the A40 would probably have won had had it been "sorted" in Clean's view so the were the best sailors.

 

[Pai]

The platter food at the tent after racing was probably the best "tent food" I ever had. I'm going to miss the steak and watching people attack the servers!

 

[Dixie]

Also, does anyone know the photographer on the seafoam green hard-top center console with 2 white Evinrude outboards? They were in the perfect spot when we hit 18 and we would all like to see the photos, especially the owner who was driving.

Peter Craig of Premiere was driving the Everglades you refer to a lot of the weekend (though not when they hit Q). Not sure who the photog was. He will surely know.

 

[MR.CLEAN]

As noted above the A40 would probably have won had had it been "sorted" in Clean's view so the were the best sailors.

I don't blame IRC at all - it's more of a lament that short course handicap racing needs, as said above, big fleets and small time spreads to be interesting to me - and that IRC has only been able to get there in a few places in the US. In fact, the only handicap class at Key West that was really good racing (according to competitors) was that IRC-2 class at KW. I imagine the 40' class at Block Island and maybe the NYYC regatta will be pretty fun, if you like racing this type of boat.

And what I said was that if the A40 was completely sorted and had the tuning time, fairing job, and maybe Robbie Haines on tactics, we could have easily found another two or three minutes on the course, which would be more than the average time we lost to Soozal by. Those guys did a great job, with a well prepared boat. But most of the others never even had a chance.

The platter food at the tent after racing was probably the best "tent food" I ever had. I'm going to miss the steak and watching people attack the servers!

That steak was righteous.

 

[Dixie]

The one thing I did not see mentioned in the article or in any of the posts is that in 2006 everyone was told that there was a issue with finding space in the main harbor and that moving forward there would be no PHRF invited, and that the OD would be hand chosen classes. I think the reaction from everyone I know was that the event would be dead in 2 years.
It is unfortunate, I love this venue and have been on a few great programs in Miami both pre and post the SORC resurection.

Sad to see its demise, but I think cutting the fleets to some mythical elite core in 2007 killed it.

This certainly explains alot...

They used to include the Etchells and M24s in the regatta sailing on Biscayne Bay. I can see where a 30+ loss of boats would happen right there.

 

[doghouse]

And what I said was that if the A40 was completely sorted and had the tuning time, fairing job, and maybe Robbie Haines on tactics, we could have easily found another two or three minutes on the course, which would be more than the average time we lost to Soozal by.

Two to three minutes? That's a shit load of time to try and find on the course.

 

[Pai]

Props to the Leenabarca tender for picking up the rest of our crew, as well as Black Ice for radioing in when our lifeline broke!

 

[MR.CLEAN]

And what I said was that if the A40 was completely sorted and had the tuning time, fairing job, and maybe Robbie Haines on tactics, we could have easily found another two or three minutes on the course, which would be more than the average time we lost to Soozal by.

Two to three minutes? That's a shit load of time to try and find on the course.

Not really if you do the numbers. We left a lot more than that on the course during some races. Shit, if the lifelines were more comfortable, we could have made up a lot of that in just hiking harder.

 

[doghouse]

And what I said was that if the A40 was completely sorted and had the tuning time, fairing job, and maybe Robbie Haines on tactics, we could have easily found another two or three minutes on the course, which would be more than the average time we lost to Soozal by.

Two to three minutes? That's a shit load of time to try and find on the course.

Not really if you do the numbers. We left a lot more than that on the course during some races. Shit, if the lifelines were more comfortable, we could have made up a lot of that in just hiking harder.

Not really between the fleet. It's about as big an expanse as the Grand Canyon when you are talking about the second place boat. Greater than 15 to 30 seconds delta is pretty damn big.

3 out of 3 of the last three years SBRW has been decided on one race. 2 out of the 3 the race had a delta of 0:02.

 

[Dixie]

Props to the Leenabarca tender for picking up the rest of our crew, as well as Black Ice for radioing in when our lifeline broke!

Really scary that those things are called "life lines," when they seem to break regularly! Glad you all were ok.

 

[MR.CLEAN]

And what I said was that if the A40 was completely sorted and had the tuning time, fairing job, and maybe Robbie Haines on tactics, we could have easily found another two or three minutes on the course, which would be more than the average time we lost to Soozal by.

Two to three minutes? That's a shit load of time to try and find on the course.

Not really if you do the numbers. We left a lot more than that on the course during some races. Shit, if the lifelines were more comfortable, we could have made up a lot of that in just hiking harder.

Not really between the fleet. It's about as big an expanse as the Grand Canyon when you are talking about the second place boat. Greater than 15 to 30 seconds delta is pretty damn big.

3 out of 3 of the last three years SBRW has been decided on one race. 2 out of the 3 the race had a delta of 0:02.

We put a stopwatch on Soozal when she'd get to the top mark. The delta from one rounding to the next often went up or down by 90+ seconds.

 

[SailDry]

The King 40 crew must be the best sailors, they won almost every race in their IRC class..... The SC37 got the shaft, what a bunch of BS. There is no way to beat a boat that was specifically built to a rating system.

Go back to PHRF you hack. When the SC37 is sliding down the west coast to Mexico they will have not gotten the "shaft."

I'll go back to phrf as soon as YOU have your boat's STABILITY measured under ORR!!!

Shouldn't a boat get measured with maximum crew weight hiking hard to determine stability? Face it, ORR is the red headed step child of measurement handicapping. It just happens to carry political ($$$) clout in this part of the country.

 

[Gone To Plaid]

And what I said was that if the A40 was completely sorted and had the tuning time, fairing job, and maybe Robbie Haines on tactics, we could have easily found another two or three minutes on the course, which would be more than the average time we lost to Soozal by.

Two to three minutes? That's a shit load of time to try and find on the course.

Not really if you do the numbers. We left a lot more than that on the course during some races. Shit, if the lifelines were more comfortable, we could have made up a lot of that in just hiking harder.

2-3 minutes from a 60-70 minute race......

That's 3-5% of your time. 4% of a 7.5kt boatspeed (upwind) = 0.3kt. You figure the boat would be immediately faster by 1/3 of a knot if you could hike that last 10% harder? Not to mention that that's just the upwind numbers.... You'd have to find that additional speed downwind as well......

Driving, tactics, trimming: 2-3 minutes? sure, if you say so. But not hiking, by itself..... That boat ain't a Melges....

 

[doghouse]

And what I said was that if the A40 was completely sorted and had the tuning time, fairing job, and maybe Robbie Haines on tactics, we could have easily found another two or three minutes on the course, which would be more than the average time we lost to Soozal by.

Two to three minutes? That's a shit load of time to try and find on the course.

Not really if you do the numbers. We left a lot more than that on the course during some races. Shit, if the lifelines were more comfortable, we could have made up a lot of that in just hiking harder.

Not really between the fleet. It's about as big an expanse as the Grand Canyon when you are talking about the second place boat. Greater than 15 to 30 seconds delta is pretty damn big.

3 out of 3 of the last three years SBRW has been decided on one race. 2 out of the 3 the race had a delta of 0:02.

We put a stopwatch on Soozal when she'd get to the top mark. The delta from one rounding to the next often went up or down by 90+ seconds.

Exactly. Shitload of time.