So with the summer rolling back around, the 11-12 season is now well underway. This season for me is a along the lines of .. have as much fun as possible with as little work as possible. i.e. just turn up and sail.

So I hopped back on the boat 3 weeks ago, as sailed at the worlds. Headed upwind, no problem, then turned back downwind and thought … this setup is SHIT.

So I went back to Rohan’s original Bladerider setup guide, and made a new bell crank to those dimensions, which also required a pushrod tweak. And OMFG, I can actually now sail the boat downwind …

Bolt on upgrade #2 is Luka’s old rudder that he had built for Scalpel, but didn’t quite live up to his expectations. On my boat however, it was a bolt-on twin-turbo.

The rudder is a lot longer, and features a tweaked version of the rudder that Dave Lister designed for the Geelong Nationals. With this new rudder, in a breeze that just touched 20 a couple of times in a building swell. The boat was as comfy as a lounge chair. It also drummed into my brain, just how wrong the old big Bladerider and Prowler rudders are.

The next piece of work is an AOA change to fly the boat more ’11 style, and also a gearing adjuster is in the works.

Oh well so much for no boat work …

So when if comes to stats, my hosting provider sucks. To get the raw download numbers is a pain in in the backside, but as I have launched a new podcast I thought it was time to check in on how Mothcast is doing.

And the answer is pretty, bloody good. The first show to break the 1000 mark was Dave’s show, but now the new record holder is Joe Turner with 5,601 downloads !. Coming in second is the latest show with Bora and Bear managed to pull an audience of 5,164 unique downloads.

Most surprising though is that all the existing shows still get heaps of downloads with our launch show having 714 downloads since November 2010, so now even it will be well past the 1000 downloads mark.

Show advertising slots are still available, and we do accept contra deals.  :-)

Here are some photos flopping around before the starts of one of the early races at the moth worlds, and they really show how the short, old, ex Prowler rudder compromises my whole setup with the bow up attitude.

Today is a lay day, so I took the opportunity to sneak out under the cover of night back to Sydney to catch up with the family.  If only I could have left the sore muscles there as well …

The first day of the nationals was a shitter for me, as I spent most of the day low riding around, and I scored a DNF after a late start when my vang strop broke and I had to re tie it on the water.

Starts are critical and my nationals results show what happens when you simply don’t engage at the start.  Now that we have split fleets, and smaller boat numbers on the start line I will be getting right in there.

We are having great racing down the back, at least we were once the breeze was in, but as always I am struggling for depth due to my weight and I am loosing places due to the extra distance.

Apparently I have also forgotten how to gybe.

On the physical front I have already lost 1.5kg in two days, and whilst sore, can already notice some changes. No surprise really when you are exercising for 6 hours in a rubber suit in the Australian summer.

This regatta has also changed one of my key ideas about moth sailing and I can’t beat em, so I will be joining em. I have decided that at some point in the future, say a couple of years time, I will be getting myself a Mach2, or whatever the current dominant design is, and developing that. The amount of time being spent just so I can plod around the back in a slow boat simply isn’t worth it, especially when people I have been racing and beating in the past have brought M2′s and I am now nowhere near them on the race track.

In fact, given the choice of a one design M2 class or a class of only homebuilt moths I would choose the one design class without any thought.

What we really need though is a second builder, that has the same performance of the Mach 2 going head to head …

So we are back at it tomorrow, and we all get to see how they will fit two courses into the space where only one has fit so far.

Oh and can we please move the top mark back down the racecourse 100m, so I don’t have to low ride and loose 10 places every time I go there… thanks.

Apparently next week’s sail sydney regatta will be live on TracTrac http://www.tractrac.com/index.php?page=eventpage&id=129.

So you can watch me DNF every race in all it’s glory… assuming the 10 minute rule applies again this year.