Less drag by bending the mast in the "right" direction
Long time , no hear. Suffering from a very bad mutant (?) flu it took me a lot of days to get back in shape and also to prepare my DN equipment which I had neglected last year after coming back from Sweden. Had been out racing 5 weeks ago and realized, something has to be done. Runner sharpening and alignment. Time consuming and difficult to really get into it when there are so many distractions. We are living in a very difficult business climate and nobody really knows when and if things will pick up again. In the marine trade business we thought that it cannot get any worse but every month shows that we seem not to have reached the bottom yet. Ask your friends, they might come up with the same answers all around the world.
Picture shows a price which I had donated to our president, who is searching by plane for the best ice conditions all over Europe
But lets not be too negative here. I am looking forward to meet with friends from all over the iceboating world. Though it is a European Championship we have participants as usual from the USA and we have Karol Jablonski, P-736, back in the fleet, sailing the DN. I really wonder why he has not been invited to share ideas and to sail one of the foiling monsters, the AC72´s. He has done a Tornado Olympic campaign. Several times DN World Champion, knows all about apparent wind sailing and sniffs the gusts, due to many, many hours on the ice where you cannot "see" the wind. Same with Ron Sherry, US-44, also a multi former World Champion.
From a Moth point of view it is a pity that Amac cannot make it. He was very interested to sail a DN regatta and I am sure the sport would suit him. He had to cancel due to business committments. I had prepared my reserve boat for him and really aligned some nice runners for this boat. I think that Amac is looking into possibilites about how to make the Moth rig faster. As I had said in some sailing forums long time ago, it is all about drag. And if you look at the DN picture above, the drag can be reduced with the help of the bending. But in the case of the DN, tests had brought the best results with the "odd" triangel shape of the sail. A fat head sail with a short foot leech did not work at the time of testing. This might change with more testing but in the meantime we are all happy with the rig of our iceboats and we love to bend it to leeward which is enabling the "turbo" to accelerate the boat like there is no tommorow. Look at this video. No drag from the bottom, the runners, just the drag, the driver and the boat and the rig are producing. Reducing the drag in the water is also what the current developement in the AC72´s is looking for. Yeep, they are foiling.
