So two weeks ago I had a little brain fade and made contact with the bottom of the river coming into shore after the race, check the foil, all intact, no problem. Or so I thought …

Whilst out last week after work, doing 19 knots, my T join decided enough was enough and decided to fail, with my horizontal filing for divorce from my vertical.

So I sailed last week’s race with the old foil in, and man what a difference. The old foil needs a lot more effort to get up and going than the new one. I did however, manage to dial in a much better set-up this time around than I have ever had with that foil. At one point I overtook Steve in is prowler heading downwind, which placed a rather large smile on my face, even though he was back in front by the bottom mark.

The divorced foil is completely intact except for the T itself, so all I need to do is the same repair that I did at the nationals, and join then back together again, but this time I will be using carbon plates made specifically for the job, as opposed to whatever I have kicking around in my gear bag.

As part of the repair process I am mentally contemplating whether a bladerider style system is a better way to go, in the future as opposed to the whole embedding of the T into the foils as it is an engineering pain in the ass.

The flip side of that though is the need to have a large, fat T join instead of a nice, thin one … decisions … decisions. I think its time to have a play in Rhino.

In other news, Grant has put Luka’s Skywalka up for sale. At $14,000 AUD this is an absolute bargain compared to other used prowlers currently on the market, and in the right hands would be competitive pretty much straight away, and it’s $4,700 cheaper than a new FX.

I mentioned in my previous post that I was comparing the same leg on multiple laps. I got the OK from Luka to make and post a video that compares all his upwinds from the race on Saturday.

I was really impressed how consistent he is, and also by the fact that all four upwind legs were completed within 30 seconds from the fastest to the slowest.

I have been performing a lot of analysis of my GPS data from the weekend, and learning a lot of where I am loosing time around the course. The sort of numbers that you can get are quite interesting, and its fun to see how you compared racing yourself from one upwind leg to the next.

As part of this analysis I have finally managed, albeit only briefly, break the 20 knot barrier.

5 best 1 second (at least) average = 33.03km/h [17.83Knots]

1 second run n°1 = 37.20km/h [20.09Knots] (10.3 m. in 1.000 s.)

1 second run n°2 = 34.34km/h [18.54Knots] (9.5 m. in 1.000 s.)

1 second run n°3 = 31.85km/h [17.20Knots] (26.5 m. in 3.000 s.)

1 second run n°4 = 31.41km/h [16.96Knots] (26.2 m. in 3.000 s.)

1 second run n°5 = 30.32km/h [16.37Knots] (67.4 m. in 8.000 s.)

There was a 35 knot peak, but that obviously was not a real data point.

Now I just need to start becoming a regular visitor.

The setup of the my boat is now finally sorted and the skipper is starting to get his shit together as well. I would be kidding myself if I didn’t say that I still has a looooong way to go, but I am definitely moving forwards.

I am still loosing too much time turning corners, but I am now getting a pretty good handle on where to go downwind (at St. George at least). Having never raced a modern, asymmetric skiff has really hurt in this regard as tacking downwind to the extent we do now was never a requirement in the “good old days”.

My straight line speed of the boat upwind is now pretty good, compared with the top guys, (if I don’t make any mistakes), but I still can’t point anywhere as high as they do. My old MSL11 and softer c-tech mast might be playing a role here, but I also think that it is probably my technique.

This video shows the start (which was the best of my career) and up until the first tack. Luka is the red boat and I am the green one, and he ended up beating me by 2 mins to the top mark.

So I still have heaps to learn, but I am getting better … slowly.