In motor racing there is a time of year called the silly season. This is when drivers whose contracts are ending all look at their options and many move from one team to another.

Well, it seems that we are now in the middle of a moth silly season with the top Bladerider sailors deciding whether they should stay with the company of follow the ex-designer to his new venture.

So if you were a top sailor would you jump ship? Let’s see.

Cost The top guys all get their boats at a discount which esentially means that they can upgrade for free. Assuming that they will get the same discount from both manufacturers, the cost to churn would essentially be zero, or very little.

Performance potential Amac has all the knowledge about what makes the Bladerider tick. Amac will develop from the work he did for Bladerider, just as he developed from the Prowler a couple of years ago. With this in mind, it won’t be any slower than a Bladerider, so the Mach 2 wins here.

Reliability With McConaghy boats building the Mach2 and a ton of experience from having built the Bladerider, I think we can expect good quality from boat number 1, so this is also a non-issue.

So where does that leave us this silly season? I expect that a lot of the top guys will get shiny new toys for christmas.

So how can Bladerider respond? In my opinion the answer is simple. Be prepared to throw away your expensive tooling, innovate like hell and come up with a better mousetrap. The real question is, can they do it without Andrew McDougall.

After another two hectic days of, sanding, sanding, filling, sanding, sanding, filling and more sanding we finally undercoated the hull today. The last two days have really felt like we are chasing our tails where just when you think you are done, you find some where else that needs filling and then the cycle starts all over again.

To get to this stage, we have added about 300 grams of filer, 150 grams of primer and 500 grams of undercoat.

The successes however just keep on coming as after a couple of false starts, we now have a completed set of moulds for the foil horizontals. In the end the total cutting time was about 11 hours, (5.5 hours per side).

I have taken a couple of days off, so the weekend is only half over (yay). Tomorrow’s to-do list is more sanding (boo), building a gantry jig and spraying on the top coats.

BMW Oracle racing have launched their 90′ square trimaran that will be used in the 1:1 match with Alenghi if the current court ruling stands.

It’s right about now when I expect Doug Lord to start a sailing anarchy forum with "proof" that a moth is faster.