C-class report from up North
We’ll be racing against Steve Clark and the Cogito team from Wednesday the 20th until the 27th in a friendly match designed to see how far we have come and no doubt will tell us how far we have to go. Alpha, our new boat, is simply an awesome boat. Designed by Steve Killing with lots of input from Fred Eaton, Magnus Clarke and Jason Lemieux, she finally hit the water at the beginning of August. Built by Object 2 skiff works in Toronto this boat has taken many lessons from the design of Cogito and has perhaps optimized a few things a little bit more if we’re lucky. Having completed a few test runs we started to wind her up to see how she went. The shots here are from the second outing in Lake Ontario and she was just beautiful to sail that day if a little scary in acceleration mode. At the time of the photos it was blowing about 12 knots and we were peeling off 18’s without too much effort. Upwind it’s like there is no drag, the boat is really slippery. Alpha is very lively relative to Patient Lady, it’s easy to feel how much lighter and jumpy she is. The new wing with the added twist controls and new aerodynamics approach is very powerful but we still have a lot to figure out about it before it will really start to deliver for us. As with anything this complicated there have been bugs to iron out and things that go bang and crack but we’ve been able to recover from those growing pains. So in about a week, with three boats on the line, we’ll know if all this work has been in vain. Blunted |
