Some people who shall not be named recently gave the club a face lift. Nice one !

Sam Pascoe clocks a new moth speed record.

“Hi, sorry to do this to you Rohan
Took the P&B sail out for the first time today. It is a very quick sail. I had a top speed of 33.4 knots and a 500 meter averge speed of 31.5 knots.“

Looks like KA Sail might have some new competion.

Update (Thur 16th Nov): It appears that Sam’s download had a bug in it, and the max speed was only 25.7 knots.

The GPS trace of one of Sam Pascoe’s recent runs has been posted here. GPS Action replay as some nice features and one of them is to produce polar graphs. Here are some screenshots of the sort of numbers a state of the art moth is capable of producing.

Maximum speed	Average speed

After 2 weeks of waiting, conditions were finally perfect to get Virtual Reality up and foiling. After the breeze came in at 11 am I quickly headed out to try and sort out some kind of setup before the afternoon race.

Out of the box, the behaviour was similar to that at the nationals where I could get it to cruse along bow out, but it wouldn’t take off.

Pit stop number 1: Lengthen the cable to get some more lift off the main foil. That was a little better, but she still didn’t fly, other that 3 inches of the main foil out of the water with the transom still touching.

Pit stop number 2: A short trip to the toolbox and I shortened my rudder foil by 10 cm each end, down from a huge 1m wide to 80cm, which is still huge. That was a lot better but she still wasn’t happy. I then changed my position to sit further forwards instead of dragging the stern so much. This seemed to work as she started to lift and before I realised it, she was out of the water. Then controlled panic started to set in; “What the frack do I do now?”. Then there was a sickening crunch as the gantry cried enough. The boat kept rising as I was looking backwards and hadn’t moved forwards until the main foil broke the surface and she dropped back down, with another crunch from the gantry as it continued to destroy itself.

With no club rescue boats out yet, I had to hitch a ride back to the shore with a nearby fishing boat.

I don’t think that I will have a new gantry finished for next week, but I sure will try.

I have been meaning to post this image for ages. This is a shot of me at the 05-06 Sunshine nationals, in never going to foil mode. You can clearly see that despite good breeze and hanging off the back corner, the bird just won’t fly.

Hopefully that is all going to change this weekend.