Feva RS3

On the 16th-17th of November, me and my crew James Baddeley finally competed in our first ever Feva event. On the first day, we went to WPNSA and rigged up the boat. After this, we got changed and went to briefing. Having checked the weather beforehand, we knew it would be a windy day, and we prepared ourselves for lots of hiking. We researched what usually happens on the water and found out that the left side would probably pay. This was very useful because, as we found out when we were out on the water, there was a lot of wind so it was difficult to tell. On the first race, we got off to a good start, beat up the left hand side, and got to the windward mark in the back quarter of the fleet. To make matters worse, when we tried to gybe, we capsized and turtled, putting us dead last. The same thing happened on the next 2 races however in the last race, we managed to not capsize and get a bit of a better result. When we got off the water, we were determined to fix the issue of capsizing, so that is what we did. We found out that you should do wider movements with the gybe, and get to the other side early to make sure it doesn’t capsize.

On the second day, we went out on the water with our newfound knowledge. In the first race we didn’t capsize once and improved our position by about 10 places! In the second race, the same thing happened, and in the third! We hadn’t capsized once and were feeling very confident. However, in the fourth race, we cut the windward mark rounding a bit too fine, and had to do a one turn penalty. This severely hindered our position, and unfortunately caused us to end the weekend with a last.

This weekend was super helpful as we learnt so much from it, and will hopefully do better in future events!

By Daniel Cullen