Armchair racer

There are a few inches of snow on the ground and mercifully my sailing waters are iced over so I do need to risk internment like our British colleagues. I am fat, happy and well rested as one ought to be this time of year at our latitudes. Plenty of time to scour reports of Moth races and more.

Amac wins the Australian title with evolution foils. Can´t really make too much of that since standard M2 foils not present for comparison. There is however one item in the reports which should heighten the resolve to develop a better flap control mechanism. If the top contenders, who we know lavish loving attention on their sailing machines suffer linkage breakages or failures, then we must conclude that systems are still too unreliable and fragile. It is true that overall reliability is increasing but if foiling is to ever go mainstream it has to reach a whole different level. Since I like to play with stuff but can´t compete with the carbon freaks/ prepreg junkies in the fleet (someone had a vacuum pump for repairs at the last Euros!) I´ll be conjuring up new iterations of the tension system which I had on my boat at the Worlds. It did not shine but it worked  with just a few hours of development time. That´s sufficient promise to keep me at it.

On another topic the America´s Cup is coming our way soon. I have to say that for a while I thought Oracle would be hopeless against the lighter, lower drag Alinghi but now that it has a wing sail it may have both more power and less drag - if they have done it right.