Footys are hitting harder these days...

Footy Class General Discussion (Footy)
1

It was my fault, I was deep in myopic excitement as I tacked onto port to make the windward bouy. Don, sailing Siren called starboard but he was upon me as I tried to correct my error and tack away… whack.

Now I was of the ‘footys go clunk’ school until that impact. Taking the speed and small inertia of the siren and concentrating it onto the end of it’s 3mm carbon bowsprit made for quite a force at the impact point. It doesn’t look a lot in the photo but I am very glad that my 1/32" balsa is backed up with 1/2" of foam core. I have little doubt that if Pond Sprite had been of 1/32" balsa only construction I would have had a hole in the side and an appointment with Davy Jones.

So my boats with carbon bowsprits are now going to get a length of silicone tubing pushed on leaving an 1/8" or so overlap to act as a bumper.

Graham

2

It sounds like you had a ‘bouys to STBD’ course set out. That causes you to approach the rounding on the port tack layline. Anyone coming in on stbd has ROW but they cannot just ‘tack’ in front of a port tacker to do their rounding., . . makes life very exciting…

Bouys to PORT is much safer course as you line up for the rounding on STBD tack. This also leads to less work for the protest committee:)

But the silicone bumper is a good idea anyway.

3

Indeed we did, with a west quarter wind though it’s our only way to go with the triangular courses we prefer. Unless we put the start line way out which would be exciting too :slight_smile: