"All of a sudden with the loads that were going on at 65 knots the boat began to feel very light and skittish and I was getting yanked around."


On the final day, by the time that third run came around, I was pretty bloody minded about it. I knew today was the day and we had just done two runs where we hadn't quite got it together. The boat had done over 60 knot peaks but we hadn't got the right average out of that. So what I'm saying is that I wasn't going out there with stage fright. Sometimes with the first boat you would go out there at little bit sheepish thinking, hell, what is this thing going to do today?  With the second boat, once it is going at full pelt down the course, it is really looking after itself. You are not using your incredible skills of helming and balance courage to get the most out of it. You just have to hold the wing on and once you have pointed and loaded it your job is to monitor whether it is in balance. If it's not you know that you will have to tweak things for the next run.  It all happens very quickly. The 50 knot run used to be about 19 seconds and now we are down to 14.8 seconds to do a 500 metre run. So usually you only have time to look around a couple of times to check a few things before you have used up your course and you are into slow down mode. The hard bit is getting the boat started and checking the whole situation. From the moment the wing is going up you are looking at all the systems and how everyone is doing everything - checking is everything tied off and secure - just to get the boat out onto the course. Then you have to stall the wing deeply to make the boat spin around - otherwise it just wants to weathercock the whole time. It's like sheeting your traveller hard to windward and reversing the rudder to spin a normal boat around. It's quite messy as the rudder is tiny and the boat is not lifting so it's rolling to leeward and burying the leeward float and burying the wing, so this is the point where you can really come unstuck and break things. That would mean the end of a whole day's sailing. It's like deep water starting a very small windsurfer - it takes a lot of stalled flow and kicking around and a bit of a pump to get it up and going.  Once you get through that difficult stage and the boat has freed itself and is up and going and heading in towards the shore, you have to sheet out and slow it down a bit because otherwise you would be doing 50 knots in choppy water. When you line up with where your run is going to be, you start sheeting on with your right hand to help the boat to start bearing away. You turn it down the course with your left hand and get it properly lined up, and check over your shoulder that the wing is all lined up.  At that point you are starting to feel that first real big lunge of acceleration where you are going from high thirty knots all the way through to 60 knots and above. The boat really takes off and you are thinking, are we in the right territory, are we going faster than we have gone before? SRM: What do you use to steer Sailrocket? Paul Larsen: The boat has a very small steering wheel from an open wheeler race car, which is quite low slung. There is not really a lot of steering to do. The boat will get yanked around by a gust and try to realign itself to the new apparent wind direction. So you might put a little bit of correction in there as you don't want to put weaves in the course because the 500 metres is between two fixed points.


July 2013


55


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