fangy (22667km):
1555 days ago Fangyland with the usual Stooges, me, Curly and Moe. An unscheduled dismount brought the session to an untimely end by virtue of removing one the bottom panels almost entirely from the KaR7.1. Post story later.
The day started well, not a Pesky on the plot. I was impressed to see that Curly and Moe had been going very hard on the pies and were now rigging normal sized sails. The result was all three of us were on 7 metre sails and FF22's, which in turn, allowed for some interesting comparisons. The most telling was that simply adding fairy glitter instead of finishing the foil to some degree of smooth, kills the upwind performance of the fin. Iain (Curly) went from Top of the Class in the upwind stakes, to Window Licker.
Moe-Joe arrived up at Boundary Island with enough time to bake and eat another pie before Curly eventually arrived, having completed several thousand more tacks to get there. Curly was using his untouched ex-foundry finish FF22.
It was a pretty telling comparison/experiment and I am confident that we can conclude that, fairy glitter aside, the smoother finished FF22’s had better lift than the rough finish. I didn’t get to see the speed comparisons between Curly and Moe, so I am not sure whether that better lift comes at the expense of a lot more drag or not.
Apart from that, it was another excellent session of crash and bash with a few U-turns thrown in. Even though the boat channel moguls were at their jarring best, the long weaving runs down the line were great fun and had me hooting. I had the long slipper nose of the old Missy Flow working overtime crashing in the chop and I lost some tidy chunks of the plastic coating off the hull as a result. However, the main casualty was my sail. I suspect an untidy dismount initiated a tear in the sail, that rather spectacularly let go after my next gybe. That spelled the end of the session. On the plus side, the reduction in sail size made it an easy down wind ride home. In fact, I was almost tempted to put up with the tortured plastic flapping cacophony and keep sailing, but I had an unusual fit of commonsense and sailed back to base instead.
Disappointed the session was cut short but despite the damage that was defo a Top Ten Fangy crash and bash sorta day. :-)
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