The first race that wasn't

I had hoped that our first race on Karma would have gone fairly smoothly, getting around the course clean with a decent result. It didn't happen. My CRA membership was not updated in time, so we were trying to explain who I was to the Race Committee 20 minutes before the start. Then, on our first set we blew apart one of our spin sheets, and without a spare, we were unable to set the kite again. We decided to race the first race, but realizing that there was no way we were going to be competitive we decided to call the racing, broke out some beer and cruised around the bay. Crew for the impromptu booze cruise was Andrew Constantine, Mike and Heather Stoll, and Shannon Bertrand and her friend. I have to tell you, the booze cruise was a very enjoyable afternoon.

Lessons learned:
1. You can't race and try to use old gear. I spent last Monday evening making new spin sheets for the boat. Next month will probably be the halyards. Month after that will be the random control lines. It isn't worth it to put the effort to get a crew together and not be able to race due to gear failure.
2. The runners take a lot more planning for your pre-start game. The new Karma is very different from the last one, and it will take some getting used to.
3. Always bring plenty of beer. In the end, the goal of going sailing is to have fun. Despite not finishing the regatta everyone seemed to have a great time.

More pics here.

Next races are going to be the SDYC Hot Rums. The calendar has been updated on the right.

New Oracle Tri

Went sailing today on Karma and took photos of the new Oracle Tri. Check them out here.

New Karma - New bottom - New sails

The joke goes something like the two happiest days you have owning a boat are the day you buy it and the day you sell it. Well I went a grand total of 4 days without a boat. Mike Casinelli (our spin trimmer from worlds) was trying to get rid of his old boat after having just purchased a Cal 36. The Kirby 30 (called Scrambled) had been very actively raced before falling into neglect before Mike saved her. While Mike almost never raced the Kirby (renamed Good Fortune), he did a ton of work cleaning her up and fixing her up.

Mike wanted to get one last race in on his Kirby before getting rid of her, so we decided to do the double handed race around the Coronado Islands. While racing we talked about his new boat, and how I had just sold Karma. Well as fate would have it, we decided that I should purchase the Kirby, and we should make a run at some of the local regattas next season. A quick e-mail to Theresa (who is deployed in Qatar), and my lovely and very beautiful wife let me buy a new boat without her ever having seen it. Having a boat that can stay in the water and isn't as extreme as the melges helped sell the idea.

The Kirby was in great shape in every respect except for two things, she needed a new bottom and her main is hurting. A quick call to a local boat yard, and we now have a new bottom.
Before:


After:


Next was a quick trip to the Ullman loft to order a new main. While there Chuck Skewes just happened to let me know that they had a carbon jib for a Kirby 30 laying around the loft that had only been up twice. So there is a new carbon #1 sitting in my garage, and the boat will have a new main in the next couple of months. Again, since Theresa is gone, I asked her if we should go carbon on the new sails or save some money and go with a dacron type main. Theresa starts asking some questions, and one of them is "Will the main last more than 5-6 regattas?" I started laughing explaining that now that we weren't doing the melges thing anymore, the main would last more like 2-3 years. Once she found that out, she immediately said go carbon. Got to love it.

I am hoping our first regatta in the new Kirby 30 Karma will be the PHRF Area G champs October 11-12 in San Diego.

Karma is sold

Karma is moving to Texas. As sad as I am to see her go, she is going to a good home and is going to be raced one-design a lot more than I ever could have. The decision to sell such a great boat was difficult, but with plans for children in the near future and the cost of the campaign starting to escalate it was time for her to go.

Karma was not that bad when the major regattas were on the West Coast of the US, but with the circuit gearing up towards the '09 Worlds in Annapolis, all the major regattas have shifted to the East Coast, and it just became to expensive to keep her.

That said while the Melges 24 era of my career is over, I also purchased a Kirby 30. While not nearly as fast or glamorous as the Melges, it will be a great boat for San Diego and PHRF racing. It will be a big change for me, and nothing will replace the thrill of closing in on the leeward gate at 18 knots overlapped with a few other boats, but it was time to move on.

I am not sure if I will just continue this blog with the new boat, or I will start a new one, either way, I will let you know. Thank you for following along with Karma on such a great journey. All of us that have sailed her have benefited from the experience, she will be missed.

George Roland
Former owner of USA-131 Karma

All dressed up and ready to go

Karma is all ready to head up to Long Beach for Long Beach Race Week 2008. As mentioned before, we did have some repairs that needed to be done to the boat. As you can see, the old pig-tail, which holds the mast up and is used to adjust our mast rake (fore and aft adjustment) is rusted and is actually cracked at the fitting. We also replaced the cleat that holds up the spin halyard and shoved something into the middle of the halyard to make it thicker in the cleat area.




That second photo shows the thicker part on the left side there, not sure if it will turn out okay in the photo, but hopefully it will work okay this weekend.

Also, due to the keel having been damaged AGAIN during a tow (this is getting ridiculous) we have changed the way we shove foam around the keel. Hopefully this will work better.






That is about it for us, some small clean up and then the normal boat prep tomorrow night, and then off to the races Friday. Wish us luck and you should be able to follow along from the Long Beach Race Week website.

Karma gets some work done

There are some updates to report. First, we are no longer going to race Whidbey Island, there were a number of issues, crew, time, money, and lack of any top boats entered all made us realize that we would be better off allocating resources somewhere else. The good news is... NO MORE WEIGH INs till Annapolis!! Ahh, the sweet taste of french fries.

In two weeks we have Long Beach Race week where we will race for the Melges 24 Gold Cup. In prep for this regatta we are getting a number of things fixed for this regatta. This is the typical process before any major one design regatta. Make a list of things that caused issues last regatta or that were broken, modify anything the crew thought could be improved, and then give the boat a good cleaning. Our list after San Francisco was fairly small, we needed to solve the spin halyard slipping in anything over 20 knots, replace the backstay, fix the broken spin bag bracket, and we felt that we should probably replace our "pig tail," which literally holds the mast up.

Last Saturday Geoff Davis and I met over at Coronado Mobile Storage to work the spin halyard issue. As is typically the case, as we started to work on replacing the cleat for the spin halyard I noticed that the keel was resting against the front of the keel trunk, which is really bad, but more on that later. We replaced the spin halyard cleat and also pulled the spin halyard, which I dropped off today to get it modified to make it a little thicker in the specific area. I also have the required line for the backstay on order which should arrive tomorrow and I will then fabricate a new backstay to replace the old one. We then pulled off the pig tail and also have another one being fabricated.

Now back to the keel. If you scroll down a bit you will see what Karma looks like on her trailer. Her keel literally lifts into the boat to allow the boat to trailer much more easily as it is not 10 feet high on the trailer (if the keel did not raise). The downside is that the keel can get damaged while towing if the boat is not aligned properly on the trailer. We place foam around the keel to prevent the keel from moving around in the box, but unfortunately during the tow home from SF the foam in the front of the keel slipped out and now there is a nice rub mark on the leading edge of our keel showing the carbon fiber. This is slow, so today the boat was getting fixed and will have a nice shiny leading edge on the keel for Long Beach (provided we don't ding it up on the tow there).

We still need to clean the boat out, it is bone dry down below, but we took on so much salt water in SF that there are salt crystals everywhere. Back to work, and I will try and post some photos later on this week if there is time.

George Roland, out.

The less glamorous side of one-design

There are a lot of benefits to racing one-design, great competition, no (or less) complaining about unfair boats, eventually depends only on boat prep and crew work. Part of the crew work also involves the crew needing to make crew weight. The Melges 24 has a max crew weight of 794 lbs. The goal is to weigh-in just prior to the regatta as close to max weight as possible. At the same time, you want to have as much crew weight as possible on the rail, so this leads to the crew needing to diet before the regatta, but also wanting to quickly gain the weight back after weigh-ins.

Some crews take this to an unhealthy extreme with people sweating out everything they can in saunas and crash diets. The trick is to figure out a healthy way to cut weight, and then gain a bit of that weight back prior to racing.

So for Karma, this means that all of the crew will need to cut some weight prior to Long Beach Race Week. For some it is only like 2-3lbs., others (like me) it is 12 lbs. Loosing 12 lbs from 176 in a month isn't easy, but it has been done before, but being that all I can think about right now is weight, boat prep, work, and school, I figured this would be the most entertaining entry.

So all of my spare time is going to be dedicated to drinking lots of water, riding my bike a lot, and playing with the new Wii Fit. If this is done right, no one will need to spend time in a sauna before racing. Let's hope it is done right.