"People look at the foils as the breakthrough, but the thing that enabled all of this to work was the initial concept of having no overturning forces."
You are looking at a lot of things and a lot of things are going through your mind but you are not totally focused in on balancing the boat because you did all that in the morning when you set the boat up and configured it. SRM: Was the final run a perfect one? Paul Larsen: On the last run, because we were going so fast, on the control sets how high the float flies out to leeward - that's the one thing I do manually control - there was nothing left to let off. We were doing 68 knots and the boat was going higher and higher and higher. So I had actually cut the string so that there would be no friction in the system so that I could back that off as much as I could. If we had had another day we would have changed the whole angle of the wing slightly by lengthening the rigging a bit and standing the wing up a bit more. At 50 knots that boat wasn't really coming alive yet as it was a bigger more stable boat. You could feel the extra weight and the dynamics of that weight as it gets pulled between the air and the water. 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. Actually, I was very worried due to the way we had started up the boat on that last run - when we had dragged the lower section of the wing through the water - that something had broken. Also, the low speed rudder had dropped back down into the water on the run up when we were getting up to around 60 knots. That gave the boat this big kick just as we were coming on to the course and meant that I had to use a lot of steering work. I was thinking something's broken, something's broken, but actually it was a series of little things that weren't that important. I knew it was going to be the last run of the day because I knew it was getting too windy and when the boat gave that big surge I thought to myself, this will do it, this is everything right now.
It was a thrilling run but in a lot of
ways it was a messy run because we had made a big jump in performance and that meant the apparent wind was a lot higher and the boat was responding to that by fling too high and the rudder kicking down was probably costing us at least a knot or two. SRM: Talk us through what it was like on the water on the final day? Paul Larsen: When you are in the boat, you are concentrating on getting that next surge and how long you can hold it in there for. The boat just kept on giving those big thrilling surges. I mean for us to go from a 50 knot average to 65 knot average and to be peaking at 68 knots was thrilling to say the least. You definitely knew it was fast but each time you are just trying to manage your expectations. A lot of runs, we just missed out and got to 50 knots, but when I hear the audio off the boat you could tell by my voice when I was on to something exciting. That last run, we actually had to edit me out quite a lot because I was just swearing the whole time: "This is effing fast! This is it!" I knew it was something special but straight after I didn't say anything. When I came back I thought maybe we had got 62 knots or something close to that. Then I saw the GPS which alternates between the peak speed and the average speed. The first number I saw was the 65 knot one and I though that it was the peak. I remember thinking, OK, good peak number, that means the average must be around 62 knots. Then the next number was 67 point something and I was standing there looking at it like a confused collie
July 2013 56
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