Little Blue Pill Required

So after a serious brain fade when packing up the boat one day I broke the existing wand supplied with the boat, and made a replacement for the lower, telescoping section (a length of 5.5mm dia carbon tube did the trick nicely). This was an easier fix than I first thought, but perhaps wasn't executed ideally...

The replaced tube decided that it didn't enjoy life as a moth wand on Monday and as such, now requires a little assistance to remain, umm, for want of a better term, erect.

The cause is most likely the fact that this wand was made with an ability to extend beyond the length of the original wand Luka had on the boat. A mistake that caused more than enough crashes as the overlength wand drove the main foil to lift too hard and spectacular fly out / nosedive crashes were the result, usually after a fairly intense roller-coaster ride with the boat bouncing up and down due to a crazy overlength wand.

All this caused a lot of change in the bending moment (from +ve to -ve every time the bungy pulls the wand forward) on the wand where the outer tube meets the smaller tube, and the end result of this is usually a nasty failure. Especially in carbon, which doesn't yield, it just fails. Spectacularly!

So until this happened I was having a nice training sail working out the dial and how to read the water for lulls and shifts. I spent a bit of time working on the entry into a tack and had a couple of times where i was still on the foils as i reached head to wind, so a promising development there too (slowing down to 10 knots boatspeed helped here). Maybe, just maybe, foiling tacks and gybes could be accomplished before Belmont. We'll see!

So anyway, here's the busted wand, new one with paddle and revised spring mount on the way in the next couple of days.