Sailing Sea Puppy

feb 24 2007 video
I took Sea Puppy out today and sailed about 6 miles down the coast and back. Conditions were about 9 to 10 knots of wind and 1 ft seas. Wind from the S/SE and seas from the N/NE. Ben took out Winds of Freedom and Angela had Valkyr out also. Needless to say Ben walked away from Angela and I as if we were standing still. A beneteau First 36.7 is a fast boat points like a banshee. It was unreal watching him pointing higher and going much faster than either of us could go. It almost looked like he was sailing in much different wind than us. On the other hand Valkyr and Sea Puppy amazingly seem to in that wind range have very similar performance. Valkyr is a Down East 38 so she has a much longer waterline and with the cutter rig a lot of sail area, on the other hand she is a heavy cruising boat. Upwind I can almost hang with her. I can point higher than she can but at a cost of about a 1/4 knot of speed compared to her. On the same heading upwind I was maintaining speed as long as I was hand steering. Using the autopilot slowed me down enough that she would creep ahead. ( the auto pilot was doing a lot of work correcting the course because of the seas being following seas. I could adjust for this better than the autopilot.) On the way back in running down wind Sea Puppy just zipped home. We walked away from Valkyr at a steady clip. The weight on Valkyr really started to count against her as apparent wind dropped off downwind.

Today was a solo day. Items of interest were the

fenders, I had put snap shackles on the fenders so I could move/remove them quickly. In the past I had just been flipping them up on the side decks and ignoring them. With the snap shackles in place it is so easy to remove and put back out the fenders that I stowed them in the cockpit locker. This looks like winning modification.

I also took the main down on a downwind course today. true wind was about 5.5 knots at the time and with the motor on and pushing us at 5.3 knots it left no apparent wind to interfere. I didn’t even use the lazy jacks.

I haven’t mailed off the auto pilot yet so I took it out to use today. It is still behaving erratically.
Here is some video from the days sailing. feb 24 2007 video