Somebody somewhere doesn’t want me to foil. Last Saturday I had wedding (but the race was cancled with 30 knot winds), last sunday the wind died before we could go out, today the wind was gusting to 30 knots and next week the fleet is all up at Toronto, and I will be staying home with the family.

This is all starting to get extremely frustrating. On the plus side though, at least I haven’t missed any club races.

After spending Sunday sanding, fitting, measuring and adjusting my boat is now ready to foil again. The original plan was to do some testing yesterday as well as setting up the boat, in what seemed like perfect conditions, however as the breeze which started out at 25 knots in the morning faded to a light breeze by the time I would have been ready to go.

Luka was on hand and helped considerably to alleviate the problems that I had previously, and the foil now has around 2 degrees angle of attack on it the right direction this time. To fit the foil I sliced up my old filler case and applied a large amount of bog to the trailing edge, it now has a much tighter fit and is inserted from the bottom, which should help significantly.

The next work item is to attack the gantry, and replace the bottom strut that is simply wrong and needs replacing. (And rather quickly if this whole foiling thing actually decides to work.)

After 2 hours with a screwdriver and a cordless drill, the new foil emerged from it’s cocoon intact, with great flap movement and feels about 2kg lighter than the foil it replaced. There was a moment of concern when the rod was stuck inside the tube in the mould, but our theory held that there was some resin on the bottom of the rod that was making it stick. This theory held true and the rod came out with some effort, but glided back in once cleaned.

A wedding on Saturday will preclude racing in the first heat of the club championships, so the rush is now on to get the finishing touches completed for some testing and setup on Sunday.

After the last attempt at replacing the hydrofoil that broke at the nationals failed miserably, we rolled up our sleeves on the weekend to have another attempt, and make the 4th foil from our mould.
Just getting to the point we could start was interesting as, although the dodgy resin was replaced by the manufacturer without charge, they had no carbon in stock, with the next shipment already overdue. Luckily, a few phone calls later, I managed to locate an alternate supplier well out of the Sydney CBD that had the required carbon which arrived in time to make the new foil this weekend.

Dad assisted as usual, and Luka made a guest appearance to assist and learn how the foil went together. We now have the whole process start to finish down to 8 hours per foil, 3 1/2 hours of preparation time to cut the cloth to shape and 4 1/2 hours to lay up the foil. The only way we could reduce this time is to order pre-cut cloth in the shapes that we require, and switch to pre-preg to eliminate the mixing of resin and wetting out of cloth. The nice thing bout the way we make our foils is that they come out of the mould, needing only the cutout in the top, a couple of holes drilled and the control rod slid down the tube and attached to the flap. Changing to pre-preg would also require a new hi-temp mould and an autoclave, which is something that I don’t have lying around. Details of the process of putting the foil together are documented in this previous post.

Yesterday was the first day back in the boat for the 06-07 season, and we were greeted by a nice 15-18 knot NE breeze, (as I write this there is a 30-45 knot southerly blowing). My total around the course time was quite poor, but I had spurts of great speed when everything was hooked up. Mark Wolny and I had a great match race in the non-foiling “division” with me beating Mark in the end, only to finish the wrong way…

The other highlight was getting intimate with the reef at low tide that sat between the club and the start line.