Its the start of the year, and Vivace is ready for the season!
The first race after being launched, was the international paint, royal malta yacht club round malta double handed race. This race is always well attended, and this year this proved true again with 17 boats on the line.
We got off to a good start and we alongside Maltese Falcon 2, it was a spinnaker start and we were off to round Malta in a clockwise direction, with a good beam wind we cracked on until we reached Delimara point, where the size of the Malta wind shadow caught us all out, those farther offshore were better off however.
We parked for around an hour, and unfortunately lost two places to yachts that had some momentum still on, as we crept towards the wind line and picked up the north westerly it was off for a beat up the west coast of Malta. Some yachts decided to short tack, we went after stronger wind a bit further offshare, a tactic that unfortunately did not gain us anything on the yachts we were behind, we did not lose either infact made some ground on the following yachts and were please with the beat in the end.
Broad reaching into the gozo south channel we were making good speed, but when it came time to raise the spinnaker the wind died and we made our way slowly up the east coast of Malta. In the end, on corrected time we were 10th out of 17th, not bad, but with loads of areas to improve on.
It was back to the yacht club to discuss what need to change when the yacht was sailed double handed, and we both knew that the reaching and downwind legs, we suffered with the symmetric spinnaker, time to get the asym’ spnnaker out for the next race!
The next race is the Gewiss Marzememi Race on 29th April.
