keltik

One argument against Mark Foy racing is that there are only one or two other boats starting at the same time as you so you miss out on the tactical fight to get an advantageous position on the starting line. 

Also you might start the race at 12:00 with no wind and barely pass the start line. Your competitor starts at 12:30 as the wind picks up. Effectively negating your handicap.

8 minutes ago, Nominal said:

How does the placing work, why is Diversion at 5 points when that time is so much slower?

In this particular style of racing (mark foy), finishing order is what the points are based on.  The boats are given different starting times to account for differences in performance. 

Diversion gets a pretty early start as the boat and crew are not generally that quick.

In the summer racing with Tauranga club, everyone starts at the same time and a correction factor is added to your elapsed time as a handicap. 

Mark foy starts result in the whole fleet being relatively close to each other on the run to the finish and every boat you pass on the water counts for position. 

In regular racing, it's a lot harder to build a mental picture of your position during the race.

Race Report - Open Series

Sunday saw the next round of the open series. Not much wind so needed to get the big cloth out.

It was the first time I had someone on the foredeck for me, the hoist was OK but we lost a fair bit of time on the drop. All of the team needs a lot more practice running symmetric spinnakers - it's probably the hardest thing to do right. 

I'm gonna try draw some diagrams to show the challenges and to help me figure out how the ropes need to be arranged for this to go smoothly. 

The old style fabric this spinnaker is made from soaked up the rain like a sponge and it weighed a tonne trying to gather it up when dropping it.  

Anyways, the day was uneventful until the final leg to the finish. We were one boat length behind Synergy (who had the club captain and commodore on board, 2 sailors I respect). They tried to deploy another sail to give them enough speed to stay ahead of us and it all got tangled up. We cruised past. They got the sail flying right and the final run to the finish required some mildly clever manoeuvering to keep them behind. 

The racing rules say as the windward boat - we need to keep clear of them, can't shut the door F1 style. They can't point as close to the wind as us with their bigger sail up. So they can't go over the top of us. They could go below us but would get stuck in our wind shadow. 

A very satisfying end to the day

Race Report - 2 Handed

Scouting the harbor paid off. In this race I managed to use one of the little side channels to great advantage. 

We took the red line through a 50m wide channel with only 30cm of water under the keel - which shielded us from the outgoing tide long enough to pull ahead of La Vida (orange line) and a couple other boats who battled the worst of the tide on the yellow line.

A good result, a fun race. There was no way we were going to catch Bondi Tram - he had arguably the best skipper in the area on board with him.

It's really hard to compare the quality of Chinese cars to another brand, I don't think you can fairly say they are x years behind any more - they just have different problems.

The focus seems to be a good looking product that has lots of features to get ahead of the competitors. Longevity of materials used doesn't matter any more. Germany has plastics that self grenade when the warranty expires and French engineering is an acquired taste... so China having cars that fall to bits quicker than some isn't a deal breaker.

Janky instrument clusters and dubious infotainment systems don't even matter now since most manufacturers have dropped the ball. 

The refinement of the driving experience is where there's still some work to be done. I think if I was blindfolded and had to tell to if I was driving a Haval H6 or a Kia Seltos/Nissan Xtrail/VW Tiguan etc just from the dynamics, I think I could do it. 

But most people don't give a shit. They are stoked to buy a car with more features than the neighbors for 20k less.

The used car market is where this stuff will really show its ugly head. I think Chinese cars will depreciate like BMWs for quite a while. 

It's bad enough we're advocating EVs on here. To be recommending Chinese ones... Is this a step too far? 

Btw Im no racist, I hate most of chairman mao's cars for completely defensible reasons i.e after sales support is generally shit.

Getting better every year tho

Also I think the white island race is coming back this year. I don't enjoy the longer races but I should do it. 

It's another type of sailing that's important to learn.

Race report - Open Series; 

Had 20kts on the way to the start line, decided to run 1st reef in the main and #2.5 jib.  Then it started gusting up to 25kts so we went to the 2nd reef.

On the first leg of the course, the wind dropped a bit so back to 1st reef.

Second leg of the course we got stuck in a wind hole trying to avoid the current around Matakana. 

While the wind was low, we got the full mainsail out and changed to the biggest headsail. Then a puff took us out of the wind hole and we started screaming up the harbor. 

The wind picked up to 20kts again and this is where the biggest mistake was made. I called for the #4 jib which is useful for 30-35kts. 

Partly because it looked like there was more wind to come (and didn't want to repeat the disaster from that last windy 2 handed race) and partly because it would be a lot quicker to set up than the #3 or even the #2.5.

The wind had a few 25kt gusts but never got worse than that. So to use a metaphor - I'd shifted down to 2nd gear expecting a big hill and ended up running out of revs on the flat. 

We lived with it until the next mark when we did another sail change back to the #2.5.

By this point, Howzat, Rascal Tom and Bondi Tram had pulled well ahead. We were left battling with Synergy and La Vida to the finish. 

Lessons learned: 

On a day with a shifty unpredictable wind. Stick with the #2.5 or #3 jib up front. Realistically they can handle 15-25kts without drastically affecting performance.  It's way quicker to reef the main to keep things under control rather than trying sail changes.

That wind hold behind Matakana has caught me twice now. Don't do it again. 

Still, even at 6th-ish place - it was better than being at work or watching telly.

Race report - 2 handed: 

Light wind forecast, put up the big headsail and compensated for lack of boat speed with good tactics.

Making sure we were in the tidal flow when it was with us and staying as close to the shallow as possible when it was against us. 

By the half way mark, we had made it to the middle of the pack and then the wind died. 

Howzat took a different line to everyone else and crept along the Matakana Island shoreline. Very slowly making progress against the tide. 

With 1 knot of boat speed against 2 knots of tide, it's a losing battle where we were.  So I dropped the anchor and watched everyone float backwards past us.

As the wind filled, I lifted anchor and gave it maximum effort to the finish line. Howzat had snuck into first place but we managed a solid second place. 

Very happy with the outcome, to be the second fastest boat around the course (including A division) really shows how effective the anchoring strategy was. Probably would have finished behind La Vida without it. 

Next open series race is this Sunday, very excited to see what we can do.

8 minutes ago, kws said:

(Whats up with the boot shape?). It's not the most efficient design, on the 1st gen at least.

If I recall correctly, 1st gen had the charger in a hump behind the back seats. Second gen moved it to the engine bay.

17 minutes ago, Regan said:

sorry for getting ‘triggered’. Will find another thread. 

I thought we were having a nice discussion.  I haven't seen a lithium mine. I also haven't seen an oil rig. Honestly I don't know the answers.

You came into the EV thread to tell a bunch of people they are wrong then have a sulk when there there might be more to talk about

26 minutes ago, Regan said:

Shit isn’t efficient and is detrimental to climate in every way. What it takes to get rare earths and lithium does more damage than an oil rig and emissions could ever do

You might be right, but I don't have any good reliable unbiased data to show the overall efficiency of oil prospecting, building and maintaining an oil rig, extraction, building a refinery, refining, creating barrels and tanks for storage, transport across the planet in a ship built for that purpose, all of the people that need to be employed to make this stuff happen and final consumption in a 50% (at best) efficient engine...compared to the EV pipeline of extracting fancy dirt for batteries

It's a complex equation. But the second we find a cleaner battery technology, EV will immediately become the clearly superior technology

1 hour ago, igor said:

Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to tie the RUC rating to the gross vehicle mass for everything as we do now for diesels? 

I guess it all depends what we want to incentivize. Tie it to weight classes and EV's get penalized.  Meanwhile a KP starlet gets a really good rate. This pushes up the value of older or smaller vehicles and reduces demand for newer safer product.

Before long we're all driving Maruti A-Stars and losing legs in frontal crashes.

You could try and tie it to some kind of synthetic rating taking into account safety, mass, well to wheel energy efficiency.... But that's getting difficult for retarded politicians to implement before they crash and run from police or go shoplifting and quit etc.

On 19/06/2025 at 14:50, locost_bryan said:

Clamp down on fbt so double cab utes get taxed as perks unless they're genuine work vehicles used purely for work.  When managers have to justify paying fbt on a $60k Ranger for a supervisor's personal use, instead of a $30k Yaris, things will change.

The fbt ute loophole is long gone as far as I'm aware. 

Nobody wants a small car because they suck. It's that simple. Bigger and heavier drives better and has more room for activities

Put RUC on everything and tie the rate to the safety rating and fuel economy of the vehicle.

Race report; 

A bit short handed with only 3 crew.  In 5th place coming into the final leg of the race - tacking through the Pilot Bay channel with boats moored everywhere.

Synergy was 50m ahead, they launched their spinnaker and pulled another 100m ahead. Here's my best attempt at recreating the drama. (Yellow line is Extract Digit, finish line is the bottom right corner).

Synergy went wide around the first yellow mark and got stuck in a wind shift near the base of the mount - which meant they couldn't run as tight an angle to the wind as us. By point number 3 we had pulled level with them.  

After number 4, we were alongside and fully intended to give them room to avoid a moored boat, but as the racing rules did not oblige us to make room for them - they dipped behind the moored boat and lost time against us. 

We finished 50m ahead of them. 

Lessons learned: The boat 'points' (sails close to the wind direction) really well in it's current setup. The time lost by running the smaller jib in the harbor is easily made up by the faster tacks and better pointing. 

The finishing order was almost exactly in order of boat weight from lighter to heavier. On a light wind day, you've gotta do something amazing to make 4ton of boat competitive with a 1ton sport boat.

Old man's C30 with the T5 in it is about to hit 400,000kms. Cockroach confirmed.  It's a great platform. Had owned since new and serviced as required. Has needed new shocks, inner CVs and some coolant hoses. Never had to open the engine or trans.

He loved it so much in fact he bought a Jap import v50 2.0 and hates it.  Has a Mazda L series engine mated to a Ford power shift trans. It will not make it to 400,000kms. It will not make it to 200. Every time I drive it, I pray it catches fire to end everyone's misery 

Another brand I won't mention throws "engine oil deteriorated" codes if it calculates low oil viscosity. 

The calculation is based on engine oil pressure vs temperature vs rpm.

So a slightly blocked oil pump strainer = lower oil pressure = fault code when the viscosity is actually ok and the oil pressure is high enough that it won't trigger other oil pressure related fault codes.

Tonight's fun little project was making the fog lights a more pleasing color. From the original yellow on the passenger side to the new almost white on the driver's.

No LED bulbs here.  It would too hipocritical to use them after swearing at other road users for years.  Settled for some stupidly priced Narva globes.

Still looking for a car to replace the wife's Fielder hybrid. Tried a CT200H the other day but it was an F sport and had too harsh a ride. Tried a F sport IS300h and yeah, too hard. Not a big fan of the IS interior either.

Open series race report. 

The crew did a great job, we were a little conservative with tactics but still managed to squeak out a win. A great photo finish 2 seconds ahead.

The final 2 legs of the race against Rascal Tom were excellent fun. Forget the win, it was a mint day on the water! 

Finish time is the important bit on that results chart. Corrected time only applies for a couple of the competitors.

Had a little bit too much sail up by the end of the race but managed to hold onto it. 

I think I'm underestimating the difference a cooler air temperature and higher humidity makes.  20kts wind speed on a hot summers day is significantly different to 20kts in winter.

Really, I need to reef the main a little earlier.

Next job will be adjusting or replacing the lazyjacks to make this easier. What are lazyjacks? Find out in the next post

You're going to love a hardtop cabin you can shimmy into when it starts pissing down.  Dog will also love it for nap time

I guess surface area is more related to effective service life than anything else.

Might have to replace it every second engine instead of every fifth.

Absolutely smoked it.  1st by a decent margin.

Now to keep that up for the rest of the series

Robert Dunn would definitely be on OS, I like his style