Hi Peter and Jonathan - welcome to the BC26 club! The Torbay and Topsham branch would be pleased to see you down in the West Country any time.
Re good slipways for launching, I can only comment on Torquay harbour, which has a wide slip (good for those of us not good at going backwards in a straight line), and access at all states of tide, but it doesn't have a pontoon along side, just a very high wall. In the season there's a long visitors pontoon a little further along the pier, but it's not near enough to be much help with launching. It's more useful for recovery as you can stop there temporarily while you get the trailer sorted. What is good is that you can get there entirely on main roads and without serious hills (give or take Haldon Hill on the A380 west of Exeter), and there's plenty of space for rigging the boat and parking the trailer (temporarily).
Brixham across the bay has 3 slipways but all of them involve negotiating some fairly steep and narrow roads with tight bends and a lot of traffic in summer. Paignton might be better but the harbour dries.
Useful tip on launching - don't forget to put the keel down asap, otherwise it's like trying to steer an inner tube on an ice rink. Useful tip on recovery - don't forget to lift the keel, it's quite hard work getting it on the trailer!
Picking up on Jonathan's point about jib furling, I have also had problems with this. I must admit that I haven't tried easing the halyard tension a bit before furling, so I'll give it a go, but be careful not to slacken off too much or you risk getting the halyard wound round the furler and jamming it. I spent a bit of time adjusting the line guide position on the furler drum and the stanchion leads to minimise changes of angle and hence friction and this helped. Also I wound some more spare turns of line onto the drum before furling the sail as this gives the line a bigger pull radius, hence more torque. It's still not easy but a good technique for furling without using the winch is to kneel on the seat, take the furling line in both hands between the cleat on the left and the fairlead on the right, then pull upwards. This should be enough to get the roll going, and you can quickly take in the spare line through the cleat and repeat. It's the same as sweating a halyard down.
I fixed the water tank/bed board interference problem by using a router to remove a 15mm section from the centre of the two stiffening ribs. It's obviously made the base board weaker but it still looks strong enough to me. I'll let you know if it breaks!
I have sailed without ballast when the wind is less than 10kts and it definitely makes a difference. On a beam reach with the kite up I've had 6kts SOG in 8kts of wind. I know that's not exactly foiling territory but it was twice as fast as anything else around at the time.
I agree with the reefing, at between 15-20kts of wind it starts to want to round up so that's when the first reef goes in, and generally you'll find that you go faster.
Anyway, I hope you have as much fun as we had last year, and looking forward to lots more hours on the water this year.
Nick
