Alfred Dijs : “Great fun and the Ginto is joy to sail!”

"After a good start the Ginto hull #9, Dijs.Net 2 (FRA 554) with Alfred Dijs and Remi Beauvais was performing very well. For the #9 it was her first race. With app. 16 knots of wind the first couple of hours we were able to achieve good speed and pointing high to the wind. After app. 4 hours the wind increased to > 20 knots and we decided to set the reef 1. When setting this reef the top of the main came out of the groove of the mast.

We put the main down and set her again. After a couple of minutes the mainsail came out again. Unfortunately we had to conclude that moment we were not able to continue sailing with 1 or 2 reefs. An option was to continue the Fastnet with full mainsail only, but we decided not to take that risk and abandoned the race. Very disappointing, also because finishing the race would have been a great training for the Transat 2007, the ultimate goal of the skippers of the GintoLab team.

When sailing back we tried the spi and the geneaker with a lot of fun. With a 16 knots of wind we ’peaked’ several times speeds of 14 knots and higher. When having more experience we think we could easily improve this speed. Great fun and the Ginto is joy to sail!

Back in the harbor we called Elvestrom Sobstad, our partner of GintoLab and they were able to solve the problem immediately. Great service.

After the Fastnet the Ginto #9 will race the Chrono, Demi-cle and the Transcascongne. The Ginto #1 Dijs.Net 1 (FRA 422) is still in the race and #5 in the series at the Fastnet turning point.