'It's been a little while since our last update, but we have not been idle. We have sought to be on the water every weekend and have largely succeeded.
We have been dogged by breakages of our lower flap, which has been keeping us busy on weekday evenings. It's frustrating for us all when we see the same component giving way over and over. But the main thing is that we are incrementally getting on top of things and our ability and the boats performance are improving appreciably as a result. Also, it is good that we, as a team, have learned to get on top of these setbacks and rally around to unpick failures, come up with solutions and essentially make whatever improvements are necessary to get back on the water and keep the learning coming.
Paul Larsen and Helena Darvelid have been to visit us occasionally, and their seasoned perspective has provided a welcome focus. It is clear that we still have much to learn, but here the delta is not what it once was: last weekend we went down to Weymouth where the winds are steady and there is space to get set up on a heading and sit there tweaking and tuning. Paul put his A-Class up against us, to give us a basis for comparison. It was a fair breeze, consistently over 20 kts and gusting past 23. We were being tentative not to power up the rig too hard, so never really hooked into "the zone", but by cracking on a bit of flap and heating things up ever so slightly we easily left the A-Class behind. Interestingly, the A-Class seemed able to point higher and run deeper, but we were being so tentative that it was hard to tell whether we could have harnessed a bit more apparent and smoked it. After a bit of minor damage with the familiar sound of flap fingers popping off etc., we decided to call it a day and to head in and not risk structural calamity. It's early days for the likes of us. Larsen would, I'm sure, be happy to show us what a C can do in that wind, but that is not our purpose. So, our strongest wind yet and still smiling. We actually have an F-16, so if we can only get that kitted out and on the water, it should teach us a lot about how far we can take a cat before it all goes wrong - we're all monohull sailors.
What we are concentrating on for now is how to improve the robustness and handling: we have stiffened up the trailing edge of the main element, which has worked a treat. We have also been working on ways to reduce unsolicited lower flap twist. The latter has been the cause of at least two breakages to the flap, and we wonder how much invisible damage there is inside the structure. So far we have inverted the flap camber control, which has worked rather well. We still have a minor mod to make to the flap twist control to remove play, and we will shortly be manufacturing new control horns. The control horn geometry, we believe, is causing the lion's share of flap twist. Also, longer horns means lower loads, and we recently snapped the 3mm steel cable (!) on the flap camber control.


Update by Andrew Boome (andrew.boome@teaminvictus.com), 18th Aug. 2009