Hiya all,

It's blowing like stink here today. the soft hangar is rattling against the container. VESTAS SAILROCKET sits snuggly inside slowly getting a fine film of silica dust over the wing and its protective cover. No sailing today... or probably tomorrow!

We are starting to get sorted out here in a manner that should improve your viewing of the project. We think we can get e-mails sent direct from the blog spot to those who wish for it... as well as High quality video which can be downloaded if you wish (we will try and make the files around 20mb). When we really get the time... we might even be able to send you the Pi Research boat data so you can read all the data off the boat alongside the video in real time. For those of you who are right into what we are doing... this is about as much as you could hope for... you would be seeing everything that the team is seeing. We like to share the love:)

Right... so here are a few pictures of the transition from having the large rudder down... to kicked up. The size of the rooster tail is impressive, over 60' long!!! You can see how clean the spray goes when the rudder kicks up. VESTAS SAILROCKET accelerated from 35.3 knots to 41.8 in four seconds when the rudder came up.

Some other interesting things were noted on this run such as...

--- there was very little load on the foot steering lines despite the large rudder generating a massive rooster tail! It was as if the large rudder was being sucked into the skeg. I was using the hand steering for all these pics and no foot steering. The large rudder naturally wanted to sit at an angle which was generating a large rooster tail. When I pulled the trip line for the main rudder... despite the mechanism working as it should, the rudder did not kick up for about five seconds! It must have somehow been locked into the case. The Onboard camera shows the release systems all working perfectly. Very starnge.

It makes us think back to Run 50 where the same massive rooster tail was being generated. When I tried to bear away with the foot steering the load obviously got so high that it tore the whole rudder off. I couldn't really see any reason why the laminate had failed as the bonding surfaces all looked good. It must have taken some very serious force to tear that rudder off. No wonder the boat leaps forward when it is kicked up! Anyway, I could go on about it in finer detail... but the point is... it shouldn't be down in the water above 25 knots anyway. On the next run I will get it up as soon as the wing is sheeted in to 10 degrees.

Cheers, Paul