From - Mon Mar 10 13:18:05 1997 Received: from beasley.cisco.com (beasley.cisco.com [171.69.2.135]) by cheerios.cisco.com (8.6.10/8.6.5) with ESMTP id MAA22005 for ; Mon, 10 Mar 1997 12:09:30 -0800 Received: from bolero.rahul.net (root@bolero.rahul.net [192.160.13.1]) by beasley.cisco.com (8.8.4-Cisco.1/CISCO.GATE.1.1) with SMTP id MAA01111 for ; Mon, 10 Mar 1997 12:09:26 -0800 (PST) Received: from waltz.rahul.net by bolero.rahul.net with SMTP id AA28690 (5.67b8/IDA-1.5 for ); Mon, 10 Mar 1997 12:09:18 -0800 From: Randy Devol Received: by waltz.rahul.net (5.67b8/jive-a2i-1.0) id AA12683; Mon, 10 Mar 1997 12:08:41 -0800 Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 12:08:41 -0800 Message-Id: <199703102008.AA12683@waltz.rahul.net> To: cliff.sojourner@cisco.com Subject: Blade Runnings 5 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 6950 Blade Runnings Volume 5, July 25, 1996 Hi! (If you received this email, you are on the unofficial Trifoiler email list I maintain. About once per month, (or more often if the news is worthy) I try to update list members with information about the Trifoiler and what I have been doing with Blade Runner. If you do not want to be on the list, let me know.) This report covers one long day of sailing on 7/20, the Silver Eagle race. >From Volume 4: |The next "event" will be the Silver Eagle race on July 20'th. At this point |I don't think Blade Runner will finish. But I will be at the start (if I |don't break something else) and try to go as far as I can along the course. |Wish me luck. We did just that and had a good time too. Shortly after tearing my sail at Richmond I got another "care" package from Hobie. They wanted more preventive reinforcing done to take "care" of possible problems. The good news is that Hobie promised to reimburse me for 3 hours of labor if I did not want my local Trifoiler dealer (almost 2 hours drive north of here) to do the work. I gladly hired Ross Handy to do the work. (He did a great job, and spent well over 3 hours doing it, but did not charge me any more.) He also faired out a ding in the rudder foil and did a wonderful job there as well. So, with repairs to the boat and sails done, I headed out to Chrissy Field Saturday morning to launch and start the Silver Eagle race organized by the Island Yacht Club but run from the race deck of the St. Francis Yacht club. All week, the weatherpersons predicted HOT, record hot days Saturday and Sunday. In San Francisco, hot weather means light or no wind, and that was certainly true on Saturday. Launching went very smoothly from the beach in light winds. Nothing to report there. The winds were light, so as an experiment, I decided to launch with the sensors off. When not on the foils, the sensors try to rest 1 foot below the water line and slow the boat down. To prevent that, the sensor retractor pulls the sensor out of the water, but pivots the entire hull upward, which increases the wake it leaves behind. Either way, there is a lot of drag. I thought the wind would be light for several hours, so I launched with the sensors stowed in the bow for mounting later. I have tried this before and it works fine in winds below 8 knots. Without sensors, Chris (my crew) and I ghosted over to the starting line with 2 minutes to go, and we started at 10:15 with the rest of the multihulls (Erin, 3 Sigma, Wild Thing, and a few others). We started last but not by much. About 15 minutes after the start, Freedom, an almost class legal C-class cat, zipped past us easily outpointing us and going faster besides, so we didn't actually start last. The first mark, Blacklaller, was upwind in light wind so I expected to get there last and we did. However, the had wind built and we decided it was time to put the sensors back on the amas and try to fly. It took about 5 minutes of swimming to get both sensors on and we were off. In less than a minute, we were on the foils, screaming across the bay at 26 knots, right toward Harding, the next mark. While jibing around Harding, we learned that the winds were not as strong as we thought. From Harding down to pier 39, we could not really sail as deep as we wanted to and stay up on the foils. We repeatedly would: reach on the foils, try to turn down as much as possible, run out of room, jib, struggle to get back up on the foils, reach, try to turn down, jib, struggle, etc. And we could see that past pier 39, the wind was much lighter. We could also see the fleet ahead in the lighter wind. We had made up a bunch of ground. Once under the Bay bridge, the wind nearly died completely. For the next 4 hours we often had more speed over the ground due to current than boat speed. (Thankfully, the current was favorable.) We took the eastern route and I think it paid off. When we passed the leaders going north, we were about 3 miles from the So. Bay mark which meant that we were 6 miles behind them, and the wind was picking up. We rounded the So. Bay mark and managed to get back on the foils. This time we got to dance a different dance: struggle to get up, once up, turn into the wind further, watch the boat speed drop below 20 knots, turn down until the boat speed is back above 20 knots, turn up, and so on. After 20 minutes of this, we sailed right out of our wind. We tacked and headed back and found better wind. Back to the upwind dance. To our surprise, we wound up just a short distance from the So. Bay mark. We had gone nowhere fast. :-) This continued for the rest of the afternoon. With two people on the boat, there was not enough wind to get up on the foils unless we were on a beam reach. As soon as we turned upwind, the power from the sails dropped, and so the boat dropped into the water. By this time, our GPS had failed (drank too much) so we could not precisely find the optimal point of sail for greatest upwind VMG, but the seat of my pants guessed that when we tacked through 110 degrees we got pretty good speed through the water (8-10 knots) and reasonable upwind VMG (4 knots?) for a boat not designed to sail in theses conditions. Like this, we were sailing at nearly the speed of the wind, with the windward ama on the foil and the leward ama splashing water everywhere. We sailing like that for a couple of hours, long enough to get to Oyster Point, to a ramp, where we could pull out, dry off, and recover from a long (fun) day of sailing. (Thanks again to my ground support, Sandy, who helped bring the trailer from Chrissy Field to Oyster Point.) According to the Speedmate, we sailed 49.9 miles through the water at an AVERAGE speed of 4.56 knots, which isn't bad considering how long we sat there drifting with the current with no wind. Our top speed for the day was 27.3 knots, also not bad. We never did catch up with the fleet, even the monohull fleet, but we had fun, learned some, and went home tired and happy. By the way, the repaired sail has a slightly better shape than the un-repaired sail. Hmm... This volume is also an invitation to join us at Chrissy Field this coming Saturday, 7/27, for a day of fun sailing, and giving rides. If you want a ride and don't mind getting really wet, meet us on the beach between noon and 5. -=O=- Randy ////||||||\\\| randyd@shell.portal.com _______\o_____//////||||\\\\| / Blade Runner ///////||\\\\\|===>\ Trifoiler Hull #42 ||______________________<=====||====>\__> ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ || ~~ \__> ~~ ~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~