Bekking og Dolmer nu på 112 fod i Carribien

Bouwe Bekking skriver fra St. Barth i Carribien fra stævnet med hjemmesiden www.lesvoilesdesaintbarth.com

Its bit of change from the last two week’s of racing. Now racing on the 112 footer Nilaya in St Barth, with a crew of 27 people and a gennaker size of just under a 1000 square meters. 

You have a bit on and mistakes can become costly  not only position wise, but more important the crew can get hurt easily on these type of boats if you make mistakes, as the loads on all the gear are massive. 

Bouwe taktik - Jens på pit

Again doing tactics and Jens Dolmer is organizing the pit and the foredeck. We have now been sailing so much together on all type of boats, that we hardly need to communicate anymore about maneuvers as Jens knows how I want to play it. 

The conditions weren’t very promising, 5-9 knots, where the 9 knots lasted only for half hour, for the rest of the day it was light. 

The nice thing of Nilaya is that the boat has so much sail area that it keeps moving and always sails at least windspeed. 

Ni både over 21 meter

We have 9 boats over 21 meters in our class, plus as well we started with 3 TP52’s on the line. 

We did a couple of time runs towards the line, to see how our acceleration and timing would work out. 

This was not for nothing and when it was our turn, we had glamour start, full speed crossing the line and rolling over the top of the TP52’s, while holding bearing and speed on Rambler 90, a full blown racer.

Gik godt indtil vinden droppede 

We went extremely well until the breeze started dropping and tacking became expensive against Rambler, they are a third of our weight(we are 90 tons) so their acceleration is much better and they kept gaining, because we had to do several tacks as the best breeze was under the close under the island. 

But we made nice gains against the other competition. After a beat of about 6 miles, we had a run of about 7 miles, Rambler slipped away, but we went nicely against the others and scored 2nd on handicap, not a bad beginning of the regatta. 

Tomorrow similar conditions and two races are planned. 

Bouwe Bekking

Vi tror det er Bouwe Bekking på denne 112 fods Baltic, der vejer 90 ton.

Se også minbaad.dks galleri fra stævnet.