3rd Training Day in Azores

Yesterday was a very nice, warm and sunny day. In the morning it seemed like not much wind is out in the bay. Therefore, most of the guys were working on their equipment. Steve Allen, Maciek Rutkowski and some other guys were playing around with their battens, Arnon Dagan and Casper Bauman went out to widen their booms with the help of Hubert and Gonzalo was fixing his battens and sanding the fin box all day long.
After hanging around for a bit I decided to look around the surrounding areas and went on a 3 hour walk. It is really nice here.
But guess what? When I came back the wind kicked in and I had to get out on the water again (damm, no rest haha).
Anyway, the wind was super light 6-8 knots in my opinion. Nevertheless, we managed to do a few line-ups with Steve, Gonzalo and Janis. I was surprised but in these conditions I was going head to head with them. Just Steve was pointing slightly higher on the upwind. So I was very happy with that. No I just have to hope for some no wind racing haha :)

Equipment
So far I see a lot of custom made or remade booms. Guys are not only trying to make them wider, but also are concerned at which place the widest point is. Some guys go for super wide back-ends, others stick with normal ones.
Another thing is battens. Battens, battens, battens. Everyone is walking around with battens, changing them, cutting them gluing them and so on...
Third thing - SLAKE masts. Janis is leading here with 4 of them, but he is changing the tops and the bottoms separately. So he has endless amount of combinations and you can see the poor guy rigging and derigging his sail after each run.
Last but not least. ELK fins are getting increasingly popular. Again Janis has a separate bag for them, but also Gonzalo, and Sebastian Koerdel have a few of them.

Check some photos that I have made on my walk: