Summer here in the UK officially ended on the 3rd October this year! I was witness to moment the beautiful weather left our shores. I took the opportunity to get a final summer sail in on monday. The weather was picture perfect with blue skies and gentle winds. This was the perfect opportunity to try out a few changes in technique and set up to try and get the foiling tack with some consistency.

Persistance and patience has paid off as I have now found that the incremental changes made have resulted in a vast increase in performance. Once again the on board camera means you can break things down and work out where to improve etc. I’ve decided against making any kind of mount at this stage as I think it means you can possibly miss the finer details like how much the tiller is working/ not working etc.

The great thing about the new set up means that you don’t really need a twist tiller to pull off tacks and let’s face it, if a cretin like me can do them then it’s got to be right?

In the video I believe Ninjario kisses the water but it’s good enough for me and there is no speed loss. I’ve since taken it to the next stage and broken down the move further to get more control throughout.

This should hopefully mean that things are good for next year assuming the rest of the world doesn’t go foil tack mad and end up leaving me behind again!

Unfortunately I cannot give any of the secrets away at this stage but I would be more than happy to do so once I become national champion

Massive thanks to Chris Rashley and Jason Belben for letting me train with them (so much rubs off that you can’t but help improve your game) and Kevin Ellway for all of the tiny changes that are making such a big difference. Now it’s all about longer hours training I guess!

It seems the mothosphere has really taken a dip in terms of blogging. I think this is down to more and more people taking it all more and more seriously. This is true for me as I have reached the point where I can actually start to see gains in speed and performance. In reality when you are running a business, enjoying your family and then trying to improve your mothing, something has to give and I guess blogging is the easiest to let go of.

It’s funny really as I normally had so much to write about but lately it’s been just enjoying time in the boat, developing and testing stuff at Stokes HQ with the Stokes crew.

It’s great to see that Chris is fully settling in to his new level of performance and even on a bad day (by his standards) is still ripping it up and going quick.

We are learning more and more each day about where the performance gains are to be had and hopefully come Garda there will be a speedy Oligario on the race track.

In the meantime, it’s back to basics and refining boat handling starting with gybing. Thanks to the bullet cam, I am able to break down each gybe and analyse where they working and where they are not which has had a massive impact on training as you can rapidly work out where you need to adjust technique. For me, it’s port to starboard which is the waker gybe but already getting better.

Starboard to port is much better than it was even a few weeks ago and again thanks to the video analysis, I can even time the transition from start to finish and have noticed the time taken to complete has halved from recent sessions. Some of this is down to the change in setup and some of the equipment which has made it easier and some is down to just going out and training with everyone else.

To summarise, my moth mojo is fully restored, I love my boat and I love mothing all over again xxx

The Moth money shot

This video was taken last saturday at Stokes Bay during a training session with Jason Belben. Strong winds and big seas were the order of the day and is a nice preview of what conditions can be like at Stokes in the run up to the nationals. (Excuse the poor editing)

Top speed of the day was 23.1 with Jason peaking at 23.7. It’s great sailing alongside (or behind) Jason as he is a man of few words and all action.. ie. one minute you are up with him and the next… great for pushing your limits.

A good example is, when rigging up I’m standing on the shore thinking “this looks pretty rough”  but Jason says nothing,  and launches without a moment’s hesitation.

I’m pleased the gybing is coming along now and it’s hard to imagine that at Silvaplana last year I completed about three during the whole regatta and they were flukes!

I think the camera is the second most important training aid in learning to sail a moth as you get to see every mistake and work out where you are going wrong/ where to improve.

From this video alone, I’ve straightaway worked out a lot of things to work on. An interesting observation is just how physical these boats are… you don’t sit still for second and if you do, you are likely to crash. I’ve also realised how vital it is to keep fluids on board as I lost my water bottle during the session and as you can see from the video, ran out of fuel!

Plenty of room for improvement but getting there…

Sorry it’s taken three attempts to get the video embeded! Technology!

This one came in via Anja who very kindly pointed me in the direction of her video stream on youtube. This video is brilliant because you can see just how high the mach 2s are foiling compared to the bladriders etc.. The funniest bit is rider SUI 3247 coming in to the gybe way out of control and nearly taking out the marker and the rescue boat (3mins 42)!! It’s also clear that some of the boats are completely set up right and appear to just fly through the rough conditions yet others seem just that little bit more unstable. Still.. great footage and thanks once again to Anja for pointing this one out..

By the looks of it, she should be the official moth camera woman for all high profile events in the future!

Here is Simon Payne delivering a series of seemingly slow but nevertheless ridiculously high altitude gybes at Hayling Island. His Mach 2 is set up to ride so high it’s a wonder the foils don’t break out during manouvers?