Build up to sailing at the RS Elite national championships - Charlie Marchant - JANUARY 2006 - from newsletter

We’re all guilty of it, spending hours playing with bits of string, tinkering with blocks, shackles, rig settings, and the boat hasn’t even left it’s mooring or trailer, all this in the hope of achieving that big goal, a win. Personally I love to bimble, and have always taken a great pride in how my boat looks and works. I’m no guru in sail design or rig set up but I soon learnt however that non of these things were going to be the major factor in getting results sailing an RS Elite. The fact is, the secret was going to be ‘good old teamwork’. I began sailing the boat back in the winter of it going through those drawn out stages of it being a prototype. What a job I hear you all say, but cold winter mornings, trying to lifeboat launch the boat down the slip with the tide half out, only to find that the keel needs to be moved and it’s got to come back out and get modified. It was during these short but sweet sails though that I got hooked. Things moved on and the boats began getting manufactured and the fleets became established at HISC and Burnham. It was at this time that Buzz (my best mate for years and past RS 800 helm) suggested that we should look to rekindle our past team work and do a bit of RS Elite sailing, seemed like a plan. All be it that we could, as many do, have sailed the boat two up but we wanted to sail for fun and Alex joined the team as our lynch pin as a middle man. The three of us grew as a team over the months by socialising together, going to Monaco for the rally, playing golf together, etc… Now a team, so the sailing began. Our first trip out in the boat was at the open meeting held at HISC. This was just meant to be a feeder into getting started and to find out if it was going to work. The winds were light and I was at the helm, constantly getting told by the guys to sit on the tiller and stop moving it! Alex was on the main and just kept it on the move to keep the boat from stalling. Buzz was in the bow calling in the gusts and the shots, with some good calls too. Lots of lessons were learnt but the basis for a good team was in place. After a great weekends racing we were then set on preparing ourselves for the Nationals. Following the event there were a couple of minor changes that we wanted to make to the boat, like enabling the centre jammer to swing 360 and fix bobbles on the spinni pole to help with the launching and recovering of it. All were small things but ones that needed doing, if not just to overcome those few psychological thoughts.We managed a few days sailing between the open and the nationals, but one weekend in particular where it all came together was only a couple of weeks before the Nationals itself. A good night’s sleep, no beer and some great food were all part of the mental preparation we needed for the weekend ahead. We went to Lymington, where the boat was based, for those enjoyable couple of days of intense training. On getting to the boat we set the rig up to the standard settings that I always set boats to, where there is about 80mm of pre-bend and a fingers gap between the front of the mast and the fordeck, (right or wrong I don’t know but it works). Before going afloat we all agreed that the breeze was up, so the D1’s got slackened off by 4 turns to put a bit more pre-bend in. Plenty of energy drinks (which always taste foul, but apparently they help!) were chucked onboard with a couple of Mars bars. The breeze was on and it soon became apparent that Buzz and I needed to swap roles. I was struggling to keep the boats speed up during the tack and then over cooking it in the gybes, meanwhile Buzz found the front of the boat frustrating. The change transformed everything. We spent about 8 hours out on the water per day sailing between two buoys getting in as many tacks and gybes as we could. A typical tack would be to get the speed up to a set number, then with a call from me in the bow of ‘three-two-one’, we’d ease the boat into the tack with everything cleated. As the boat rolled through so we’d move slowly through the boat whilst easing the main and jib. Naturally now knowing how each other moved in the boat we’d all sit down at the same time, aiming to only loose 0.6 of a knot. Then with a slow call again the sails would get re-trimmed and the speed would get called until back on the pace. This was repeated time after time until perfect. The same applied for the gybe, with small things getting changed each time until it ran smoothly, where the kite wouldn’t even consider a collapse. As a change when the tide was slack it gave us the chance to look at something different, ‘boat control and responsiveness’. We’d sit completely stationary 3 boat lengths to leeward of a racing mark, and then time how long it took to power the boat up to max speed by the time we got to the buoy. Every time we did something different until we cracked a routine that seemed to work for us. This all sounds very tedious, but it helped us deal with things as a team, especially when things were going wrong!! The week prior to the Nationals was one of discussing our plan of attack, and talking through various scenarios that we were sure to face. Again no late nights, good food and no beer were all part of the preparation to such an event. The event itself was one of the best I’ve sailed, with perfect breeze, plenty of sunshine and some great sailing banter both on and off the water! To sum up, there were two important things to our success in winning the RS Elite Nationals, they were: to work as a team, and in some respects more importantly due to the venue, ‘stay out of trouble’. Enjoy sailing for the New Season ahead, and I look forward to seeing many of you out on the racecourse and in the bar for that good old bit of sailing banter.

By Charlie (Demo Dave) of RS

SAILING YOUR ELITE TO WINDWARD - SANDY WOODWARD - SEPTEMBER 2005

I feel it is a bit of a nerve for me to pontificate about how to get an Elite to go to windward when my performance to date has been so abysmal - but someone ought to try to record something for Tweaks and Tips on the website  -  for all to criticise.

So, first: weed on the keel. Our keel and our rudder, having a vertical leading edge, are particularly prone to catching any bit of weed we go through. There is a lot of weed about at HISC, particularly in the harbour and entrance on the ebb.  You need to stop your boat head to wind and hold it there as you gather sternway [not easy as you have to steer in reverse] to get rid of it. Sometimes pushing the boom out helps you slow down and go backwards – but go backwards you must in order to clear it. This needs to be done immediately before the start - and, in my case recently, on two occasions after the start [which loses you any hope of ever catching up anyone but the seriously incompetent or similarly weedstruck]. It is usually fairly obvious but not invariably; a slight wobble on the tiller is one clue for weed on the rudder; a small or large reduction in performance on and off wind is the only clue you have to weed on the keel.

Next, setting up the rig.  Rake is very important here.  Much has already been written on the subject  -  some of it quite good. The only reliable method of measuring rake is with your boat level fore and aft in the water  -  comparatively easy to do at a pontoon in calm water and very little wind but difficult in any other situation.. If you have draft marks, they are good. Otherwise, get her level by comparing the long stripe along the hull with the waterline and ensuring they are parallel. Hang a reasonably heavy weight [couple of pounds at least] from the main halliard and observe which spot on the deck it is immediately above with the forestay pulled in tight as for sailing in a F4+ [i.e. about as tight as you ever have it]. If your prebend is on the 100mm [4”] mark, as recommended for the new mainsail shape, the weight should be directly over the lifting eye [or as much as 4” further aft of it???].  If you have more than 100mm of prebend, then it can be aft of this  -  if you have less than 100mm prebend, it can be forward of this.  A check on correct rake is provided by the amount of weather helm you need in a F4.  You haven’t got enough rake if you can discern no weather helm on the beat and heeled even slightly.  ‘Discern’ by touch, feel, or look relative to the fore and aft footbar, [provided your tiller was put on straight] on either tack.  If you have it on one tack but not the other, your mast is off vertical or a shroud is pulling out [same thing] either way, and you cannot not have optimal windward performance [as I know from personal experience] !So much for rake, now for sail trim  -  a much more complex and arguable subject. Jib first: Hoist it as high as you possibly can [by putting the halliard end through the head cringle and tying a figure of eight in the end – the cringle can then go close up to the sheave in the mast], then adjust the Cunningham for the right tension – not too tight though, just get rid of the more obvious horizontal creases at the hanks. You may need to leave the bottom hank off and replace it with a small shackle to keep the tack up to the forestay. The car position seems critical; while you should usually have it right out to the end when off the wind, you should bring it well in when on the beat.  Just how far will be a matter of taste and experiment  -  everyone still has different ideas;  Nick Peters likes it well out on the beat in stronger winds but isn’t telling us where it is in light winds: Mike Tong likes it well in most of the time except offwind.  I think Mike Tong is right [or it happens to suit me]. In either case, the sheet is fairly hard on, but letting it off a touch to see if it improves performance is worthwhile from time to time, particularly in lumpy seas.

 The jib car position, if you fancy trying it well in [and I’ll tell you why you should in a mo] is about 1” to 1.5” in from a line along the inner cockpit extended forward  to where it crosses the car track. If you’re not used to the idea and can’t be bothered to measure, this should look much too close to the mast for any reasonable slot between the jib and the main. For 150% overlapping genoas, it would certainly be too close and perhaps so even for a 115% overlapper. But for a self-tacker , the jury is still out.  Very few racing boats larger than dinghies have non-overlapping jibs and I suspect all previous thought is badly wrong.  What happens is that, by having the car well in [but not completely closing the slot], you decrease the angle off the fore and aft line, and the sail only starts to stall 2 or 3 degrees higher than the others who left their cars out or failed to pull their sheets in, or put too much tension on their halliard with the Cunningham or had a seriously baggy sail etc., etc.  In other words you point a touch higher without stalling the airflow on the jib or jamming the slot between the jib and mainsail. Now for the clew hole selection  -  you have five options. You should usually have it so that the top woollies stall first as you come into wind  -  but only just before the lower ones.  This means you have about the minimum twist in the jib, but as the wind strength increases, you should give yourself more twist by taking a lower jib clew hole. Find out what suits in F3 and be ready to go up a hole or two in stronger forecast winds.

Jibs will inevitably vary  -  mine, on the top jib clew hole, already gives too much twist for anything under F5, most people recommend the second bottom.  The right answer is that you do want a little twist in the jib in F4 minus, but not very much and you will want more as the wind gets stronger.

All that has to be good provided you can keep the flow over the main smooth too.  So it will generally be a bit flatter [clew outhaul tighter] than you may have been used to and you mustn’t fuss if the luff of the mainsail lifts or seems to shiver a bit too -  the luff of the main wouldn’t be doing much for you anyway, so provided it is not seriously upsetting the flow, don’t worry about it.

As winds get stronger, your boat will naturally tend to heel more than usual, even though you have already flattened the sail as much as you can..  Don’t fuss about that either, just let her come up closer to the wind and sail her “by the bum”  -  i.e. less by what the sails look like than by the angle [power] on the boat; let her come to about 10 or less degrees heel and, if she had been over at 20 degrees, watch the log give you another half knot even as you point higher a couple of degrees !

So where does the mainsheet come in all this? Here again, the problem is complex  -  because you have to think about the mainsheet  in terms of wind strength, sheet tension, kicker tension and car position, all at once.  The kicker is the main controller of twist – the harder on the less twist.  Not normally much of a problem but in our boats, with all that sail right up at the top, it becomes much more important, it has to be right and the only way to find that is to fiddle with it on the water.  Your No2 has to play with it the whole time. The traveller for the mainsheet car is a different matter.  In the original design, the car was always difficult to move [for various reasons]. The track was not correctly angled  [changed now but made little difference], the mainsheet has three parts of the sheet going through the block on the traveller [standing part and two moving parts, one up/one down, so there is quite a strong pull on the car making it three times more difficult to move than it is for the clever dicks who have changed their mainsheet arrangement so that there is no block at all on the traveller – that end of the sheet attaches directly onto the car.

This slightly reduces their power on the whole sheet [by 1/6^th] arrangement and results in some of them wanting a “fine tuning” tackle on the other end.  That takes them to a power ratio on the whole mainsheet tackle of something like 12:1 where the original design gave only 4:1 together with fine control of the sheet and quite a lot of extra string in the cockpit.  This is an important [in its effects] modification under trial [by Mike Dawe] and has yet to come before the Committee for approval/non-approval.  Nick Peters already has used it illegally in the April Open.  

So, if you are not yet a tweaker and have stuck with the original set-up, you will have difficulty with moving the mainsheet traveller when any weight is on the sheet. So you tend not to use it much, despite the occasional need to do so below F2 [traveller to windward a bit] and above F4 [traveller to leeward a bit].  Again, only your No2 can do it for you, if the helm tries to adjust the traveller, you’ll be off course in the next half second and losing ground.

Which brings me to my last point [I hope].  This boat is longitudinally unstable, dagger keelboats always are, so it needs careful steering. That alone is a reminder not to allow the helm to be distracted by other problems. At the same time, its rudder angle is rather insensitive to the touch on the tiller because it is 'too balanced'! One half of one seconds inattention on the beat can result in being 10 degrees off course and 3 yards lost to windward or half a knot of speed lost taking a minute to get it back [that’ll be the best part of 8 yards lost along the track though you may have gained a yard to windward]. Do this only 10 times on one beat and you have lost 80 yards  –  shall we say three places on every beat?! The helm must not have to do anything but concentrate on steering. His No2 has to do all the timing, trimming, tactics, windshifts, buoy spotting, opposition watching and navigation. He should be as a busy as the helm if not more so, dancing from thought to thought rather than sitting fatly on one side of the deck admiring the view and waiting to get out of the way for the next tack.  You can see I have had one or two other problems along the way!

Is this enough for starters?!

*** THREE IMPORTANT THINGS TO REMEMBER WHEN SAILING SAILING YOUR ELITE - Peter Wareham - MAY 2005

(All based on recent incidents or near misses.......)

1. Bearing away - in strong winds - need to release the KICKER as well as Mainsheet !!!!!!
2. The stern overhang may be longer than you are used to - may even be an idea to put some black tape on the extreme ends of the upturns of the transom to indicate this to other boats!!
3. The Racing Rules of sailing - which have been modified this year..................!!

*** Sailing the Elite Upwind in F6/7 - Nick Peters - Sept 2004

1. Allow considerable mast bend. Ease the lowers and get rid of the luff
round. the mast is not a telegraph pole and should not be used as such. Max
cunningham to flatten and open the leech. Rig tension maintained to avoid
inversion downwind.

 2. Move the jib track stops ALL the way to the end. Is everyone really
doing that??? Attach sheet to lower clew cringle. Jib tack right down to
deck on hard cunningham. The sheet should be kept quite hard, but with these
settings the leech will be fully open and not hooked. It then will barely
backwind the main.

3. I'm not sure the traveller is a big issue as the sheet is way off anyway,
but experience will tell here.

*** Rig Tuning Guide - Chips Howarth (Proctor/Selden) - September 2004

RS Elite Recommended Settings

Given the design nature of the RS Elite rig (swept back spreader, no backstay rig) there are certain rigging guidelines that need to be followed to maintain optimum rig stability and ultimate top performance of the boat.

Listed below are some recommended settings:

10 knots and above

Rig Tension – Cap shrouds should be set at between 600-700kg, on this type of rig it is very important the leeward shroud is tight when sailing to windward.

The D1s should be set to give the optimum pre-bend for the mast, for this type of rig approx 100mm of pre bend is ideal, and is the recommended bend for the Batt mainsail. This can be set via adjusting the tension in the D1 wires.

To measure pre-bend, a recommended method is to pull your main halyard down to the boom bracket and pull tight, then measure the distance between the halyard and the mast at the spreader bracket height with the rig under tension.

To achieve 100mm of pre-bend, an average D1 tension will be approx 200kg.

Mast Rake

The recommended mast rake should be approx 1' back. A simple ‘pontoon’ measurement method for this is to tie your adjuster spanners to the main halyard (on a windless day ideally), and let the main halyard hang free. The spanners should be vertically above the lift hoist position with all rig tensions on.

Light Air Tweaks In lighter winds (sub max power) when the boat is not at maximum heeling, it can be fast to ease the rig tension to induce depth in the luff of the jib. This will have the affect of raking the mast and induce weather helm into the boat (which will have been lost with the boat coming more upright). It is vital the rig is re-tensioned once at full power.

*** Spinnaker Handling Guide - Peter Wareham - August 2004 - based on twin pole system

SPINNAKER HANDLING GUIDE – split between front and middleman if sailing 3-up

HOISTING

1. Open the Chute cover
2. Uncleat guy and sheet
3. Pull in and cleat the windward side twinning line
4. Uncleat the leeward side twinning line
5. Uncleat the windward side ‘pole end’ cleat
6. unclip the windward side pole (elastic on boom)
7. Push the windward pole out and clip to mast – it runs along the elastic line
8. Hoist the Spinnaker – halyard on floor
9. Make sure the pole is out and forward
10. Pull the pole end out to the end of the pole
11. Pull in and cleat the guy
12. Pull in and play the sheet – Helm can start this while crew is finishing off
13. Close the chute cover

LOWERING

1. Open the chute cover
2. Hand sheets to helm or middleman
3. release the spi halyard and pull down with the spinnaker downhaul – it will go down partly
4. release the pole end line
5. complete pulling down spinnaker
6. unclip pole from mast and restow on boom – push along return elastic and then reclip elastic tie
7. close chute cover
8. Tidy up all lines

GYBING – RUN TO RUN

1. Hand sheet and guy to helm (or middleman) – they should play the spinnaker through the gybe
2. Pull in and cleat leeward side twinning line (both are now in and cleated)
3. release pole end on windward side
4. unclip and stow pole on windward side
5. Helm gybes boat (main) – crew keep heads down
6. push out other pole (new windward side) and clip to mast
7. Pull out and cleat new pole end line
8. uncleat new leeward side twinning line
9. Cleat new guy in right position
10. Take new sheet from Helm and play.

GYBING REACH TO REACH

As above except – the helm may not be able to fly the spinnaker throughout and the crew should concentrate on pulling the old guy (new sheet) round the front of the boat through the gybe…- (as the boom goes across) – to do this they should ensure that the windward (new leeward) pole end and twinning line are released.

OR – lower spinnaker followed by rehoist on new side……….!!!!! This method recommended in F4 and above – may be quicker and tidier!!