We loaded up the boats on the trailer for our first sea trials today on Lake Wheeler to see how the boats paddled and try out some different configurations. See a short Video Here. It was VERY windy today (steady 15 with gusts to mid 20s in the morning and calming down some in the later afternoon). We got out to the lake and rigged up the boats on the beach. We still don't have the seats, lee boards, rudders, hatch hold downs, masts, sails or cockpits installed but we hope to fix all that soon. For today it was just a necessity to see them get wet.
The boats were rigged up pretty quickly and we proceeded with our official christening ceremony. (In case you were wondering, the speech can be found online with a quick search) The boats are now officially named "The Rise" (yellow) and "The Fall" (orange) in keeping with our team name.
I performed the ceremony with witnesses present (Cheng and Brian, some sailing friends). We hope for good fortune and safe sailing during the EC. Cheers everyone. After the christening, we suited up and shoved off. The first thing we noticed was that the boats like to tip from side to side a lot when completely unloaded and paddling was done at about a 10 degree bank to the water. Again without seats and real cockpits it was hard to get an idea of how it will be for real and we most definitely need to get those rudders on.
She paddles into the wind fairly easily but turning into the wind was another story. This was not a surprise, we have a lot of area on these high side panels. Here is Chris and Mike doing a pass by the shore. You can see the angle of the hull to the water. With loaded boats this will decrease to some extent. We may end up extending the ama pylons but we are going to do more experimentation with the sails and masts and amas like they are before making major design changes. We also joined the two hulls in catamaran configuration and found this to be much easier to turn in the high winds. This will be our most advantageous configuration for sailing. We left the amas on shore for the first test but there was plenty of room for them.
After our canoe trials we decided to take more advantage of the windy day and so we took out one of the NCSU sailing club's Flying Scots for a quick sail. See the video of us on the Scot here. It was very windy but with 6 guys in the boat we didn't have much trouble holding it down and we had some sweet downwind reaches completely up on plane in the high winds.
After sailing, we packed up our mountain of booties and spray suits. Chris was at war with his spraytop for quite some time so I thought I would snap off some pictures of him instead of give him a hand. I couldn't resist. He did eventually escape. We found that the amas could be transported above the hulls using the crossbeam supports since they are fairly convenient and leave space underneath for sails and masts in the future.
All in all a great day at the lake. We learned a lot about how the boats handle and are anxious to get everything else done so we can GO SAILING!Thanks for reading! Thanks Brian and Cheng for taking pictures and helping us carry stuff down to the water.
