Activity day with wake surf and extreme sailing Nacra f18

On Saturday two days ago I was invited by Jorgen to join him on a activity day. We started in the morning with wake surf. Wake surf is when you stand on a board close to the boat and try to surf on the wave from the boat. This boat don’t give big enough waves for drop the line you hold totally, but sometimes you have almost no force in rope, and you actually have a nice feeling of surf. After all not as fun as surf for real, but it is a good preparation for Maui later this year, and for sure a nice way to be on and in the water. I think Jorgen and his friend who together own the extremely nice self renovated boat have planes later on to have some weights inside the boat to get bigger waves.

But it was later on the day I entered climax as a water addicted person I am. Jorgen and I had an extremely cool sailing with a catamaran called Nacra f 18 which is the same boat as in this you tube video. ( It us not us on the video , but the boat is similar)

A bit about the boat: I have sailed a lot in my water career, but always had a dream about sail a catamaran like this. The Nacra f18 have all the equipment you can dream about. It has all the ropes where you want them to be, all the clamclite mounted exactly where they should be. No extra things, pure 110% sailing machine, and with genaker inside a storage place in the front lunched only with a rope, and the front and main sails in pure Kevlar. The front sail and main sail when raised have no rope going from the top of the mast to bottom (called fall in Norwegian) the sails is mounted with a ring in the top. The benefit of this is that you don’t get the horrible stretch in the rope (fall) from the sails. All the adjustments is extremely nice with downhaul, and the front sail for sure have a rail. As already said 110 pure sailing machine. When the wind is strong enough both in the boat can stand in trapeze. And for sure this day we had opportunity to do that. The wind in the stat was like searching for places with most wind. Later on way op in the fjord of Oslo we had the genaker up running , but suddenly all of it felt a bit uncontrolled and we took down the genaker again. And then suddenly the wind increased to 12m/s in 2 sec and in 0.001 sec we totally missed the control of the catamaren when it hit a wave in front and the nose diged down and we got an extremely catapult fall with the boat tipping vertically front forward. I was the by the tiller and was thrown about 4-5 metes in front of the boat. Jorgen who was beside me have seen me in his left eye’s thrown over him. For sure we was in the water and the boat was around, but luckily it was not totally around with the mast down, and was quite easy to turn right again. But with all the wind blowing and with the force in the now loose sails it was really hard to get in to the boat again. After that we had a bit time with thinking about what happened and what to do next, but after 5 min we was both in the trapeze again with extremely fast sailing. Sometimes we manage to have extremely nice teamwork between the sail man and rudder man. We now had the weight far back in the boat, now with Jorgen standing in the footstrap way behind. Sometimes we where both so existed so we just stood there with a big loud laugh. Next time when sailing in 10m/s it will be nothing compared to this day.

Jorgen took some pictures form the wakes surf and some pictures form the catamaran sailing before we got the good wind. I may ad the pix later on, I don’t have them here yet.