After my last post I realised that I was being stupid.. Why kill yourself working when the whole point of being self employed is to avoid exactly that? I  decided enough was enough and I took today off (yes lately I’ve been doing 11 hour days 7 days a week!) and headed over to the Hayling  playground to join Graham for a bit of training.

Ricky helped me rig my sail properly and it was much better in the light stuff. Most importantly, today was always going to be about gybing.

Truth be told, I’m all gybed out… I lost count of the number but it was somewhere near 50. In the light stuff I seemed to be on it again and it all went pretty smoothly. Ricky also gave me a magic pointer and suggested it’s all in the sliding action on the tiller (more on that another time!) which helped loads.

Then the wind picked up a bit and I was suddenly back in trouble again where every time I gybed the boat went in to a nosedive midway through. After a little bit of this I got bored and angry with myself as I had to be doing something wrong and couldn’t blame the setup.

It then finally clicked as I was going through that for some reason I started a new habit of trying to force the sail across early. As soon as I stopped doing that, hey presto I was foil gybing. I spent a total of four hours on the water and boy do I feel it now after spending the last two weeks sat behind a desk earning blubber points.

Hayling is great for gybing as you simply have to otherwise you end up in a sand bank or the side of a yacht or cruiser.

So now I can gybe it needs refining so I’ll be doing the end of season training session in November followed by lots of sailing over the winter and then Mar menor Moth fest in may next year.

I’m going to bed now and I’ll be dreaming of gybing.