"I was slightly numb to the sensation of speed. I actually feel it more when I am on the freeway at eighty miles an hour and you suddenly realise that we had been sailing this fast!"
SRM: Talk us through what happened next? Paul Larsen: So now felt like we were taking a gun into a knife fight - but it was still going to be a fight. We still knew that we had to actually hit the target. It was on the Monday that we did a really good run in terms of boatspeed to windspeed in very light winds. We hit some really nice numbers. It was only a 47 knot run but it was in just around 20 knots. I remember we all thought, that's unusual. Then we had to wait for the Friday when we had stronger winds. Even on the last day when we had already got the mile record, we still kind of weren't happy. Once we had absorbed the fact of 59 knots, it was great to get that top step but it was never as much as that boat was designed to do. In fact even now, the speeds we have achieved are short of what the boat was designed to do. We felt that we had gone from the hunter to the hunted in that the kiteboarders could still potentially get that number with a big run. I didn't want to leave Walvis Bay sitting on 59 knots, so each day we were going out to ramp it up. We had to really work hard on not getting too excited and try to focus in on not doing something stupid and fumbling the ball. I like the fact that we had to fight for it and the fact that we could show that we weren't being gentle or shy of the boat - we really had to go out there and treat it like a tool to get the job done. SRM: You were the pilot but it was a team effort that made your success possible? Paul Larsen: We had a good team of guys down there and we got the process down so that just three of us could handle the boat in terms of launching, sailing and retrieving it. That in itself is pretty impressive when you are talking about a one-tack-wonder of a boat like ours, where you are talking about raising and lowering wings in that much wind. But by only having three it means that you all do your jobs and it's a very easy, tight team to coordinate. We had to punch out three runs on that last day - we were hoping to do it in one or two - and we just kept turning it around and turning it around and it worked great. After we finally got it, one of the happiest moments was walking it back completely in one piece. The old boat was a scrapbook of major crashes, but with the second boat we did that whole programme, other than one fumble when we were actually towing the boat boat rather than sailing it - without damaging it. In fact, I remember I used to spot a little scratch on the boat and say 'bloody hell look at that, I think somebody must have done that with their drysuit'. I think that was the proof that we had all done a pretty good job from start to finish with that boat. SRM: Describe what it is like in the Sailrocket cockpit at those speeds? Paul Larsen: It was, I suppose, the rush I was always looking for. You could see the boat was already going fast and you knew that to achieve something special in terms of record speeds you would have to feel that boat lunge again when you saw a gust coming. I had done so many runs that I was slightly numb to the sensation of speed. I actually feel it more when I am on the freeway at eighty miles an hour and you suddenly realise that we had been sailing this fast!
July 2013 54
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