So I got down the lake early and got it rigged, there wasn't a lot of wind, but I thought it would be handy to tag onto the end of the race to get the feel for the controls in race conditions and such that if anything would be the boats worse performance.

So the gun goes and I'm stuck on the only shallows in the entire lake and they go 'oh forgot to tell you stay away from that post' as they drift off towards the 1st mark in the faint breeze which dwindled to nothing by the time they got there. We eventually got ourselves off the sandbank or whatever it was and drifted up to the tai lenders by the first mark, but it was such a raft, I thought better than try and barge through so I hung back and dwelt on other issues, one of which was trying to sheet the kite in, it was catching in the shrouds, because of the angle of the pulley I'd sighted on the racks.

Then the mainsheet came totally undone, and by the time we'd drifted down to the bottom mark and hardened up it was difficult to see any airflow, even the tell tales had stopped fluttering. Eventually a bit of a flurry filled in from behind which got us round the 1st lap, this eventually strengthened sufficient to get some directional stability, this bought with it other problems.

The stronger the puffs, the more weather helm became apparent, I didn't get that much last week in the quite strong breeze, but this light barely force two, had me constantly fighting which meant the brake was on the whole time and I'm now puzzled as to what's different. OK last week I wouldn't have been block to  block so the main power would never have been that fully sheeted and when it was I do remember a bit of weather helm, so I'm convinced I need a bigger jib, and the mast needs to be a tad more vertical.

I had a bit of a measure of that main, when I got home and even at two thirds base times height on a boom vee height measure only gives 8.8 sq mtr so I'm suspicious of the power of this rig, I don't think it's big enough. I barely got a hull flying last week and that was breezy, so I'm having a think at the minute. Brought back the Alto main (my small one) and it's way bigger than this Vortex 10.5 even on the same mast height, the Alto has a bigger foot, that in itself means it'll be more efficient, these high foot big aspect sails are only any good in a breeze, so it makes the acquisition of a more powerful jib more necessary if I'm going to have any traction in low wind.

I had one incident when the merlin that was being sailed by Neal and his crew came pouring past, they had a strange looking kite up on what was close to being a windward fetch and round bottom boats do well anyway in that stuff, but they shouldn't be coming past as fast as they did, well not and make me happy. So right now I'm thinking more power is required and of course less braking action from the rig being out of balance again.