One up cup

As last year the one up cup was held again at the RBSC Zoute. It's is a great location to sail and the races are very well prepared. And I should forget the great barbecue they have!

Also this year the A-cat Belgian nationals were held during the same weekend. 13 A's turned up so I was confident there would be a nice racing field.
With the F18 worlds coming close (starting 11th of June), the turnout of the other singlehandlers was very low (3 compared to 13 last year). The A's also had a seperate start, leaving us starting with 3 boats....

Both of the racing days were quite comparable to each other. Both started with lots of fog and about 7 knots of wind. Towards the end of the day the wind gradually dropped to about 4 I guess.

Great thing that there were only three of us racing was that you could really concentrate on getting settings right (because you hardly ever had someone near you) and I learned a lot about pointing and getting to feel the boat in light conditions (there simply was no one to follow).

Generally I could say that I could trap out faster then the FXones upwind (but those A's are trapping out even faster! It is really unbelievable how little wind they need to go on the trapeze). And when it was the case the Blade was a lot faster upwind. When the wind dropped and I had to sit in, I got away from the FXones, but I couldn't take a really big lead.

On the downwind the difference between the Blade and FXones was bigger. I could easily fly a hull and when I did the Blade was a blast.
When I couldn't fly a hull, the 'cruising' speed was a little higher then the speed of the FXones, but in the (small) gusts I accelerated a lot more and this gave a great advantage by the end of the downwind run.

It was a great experience again to sail the Blade F16 singlehanded again and I can only encourage other singlehandlers to join the event again next year!

In the one up class I finished first overall (results).
The A-cat top three was: 1) Sjoerd Hoekstra(NED3), 2) Chris Field(GBR007, 3) Areno Terra (NED2) (full results).