Munter

Ha! back to the days of wild experimentation with outline - I love it!

ABC showing WOXI with most crew up on the bow to lift the stern and shy reaching on port.

Oats Is now reaching on starboard.

ABC shows WOXI in front

Those of you using dyneema lazy jacks - do you ever find that batten pockets or other sharpish parts of the main pull strands out of the rope weave or does it all hold together pretty well?

Even jokingly speculating that they would deliberately damage the TNZ boat is going a bit far. I know they aren't a paragon of virtue in terms of cheating but lets keep it real.

They could probably gain 0.5kts by deflating JS's ego by 50% so that it didn't cause so much drag. It must be a real headache having to drag that monstrous lump around the course.

I'd guess that either they can get by with just two cyclos at any one time or that they could keep two each side during heavy maneuvering.

1/2 a Sydney to Hobart sounds like a bloody long way for an over-grown beach cat to be sailing each week!

Shocker by oats but that kind of start has worked for them in previous years. CQS looked messy but will hopefully pull it together. Loyal looked better practiced but still had furler dramas. It will be interesting to see the pecking order emerge this afternoon.

I saw CQS on the water on Sunday. Its a funny looking thing. They weren't pushing it for speed at the time so it wasn't possible to see how it really worked. The foil was deployed and seemed to interfere at the water surface quite a bit but that may have been because they weren't sailing sensible angles to get through the harbour traffic. Overall it looks like an extreme long shot to think that it might keep up with Oats.

Not looping around the circumference of the ring is fine for applications where you are only deflecting the line but in the case of a vang where the load is high and the purchase rope is being turned 180 degrees you run the risk of distorting or breaking the ring. I would try to find a way to remove that load which means one line around the outside and one line through the middle.

At those speeds the teams must be approaching similar foil issues/limits to what sailrocket had to deal with before they smashed the record. Its amazing that what was speed record territory just a few years ago is now achievable on a race course.

So what updates on the flying fandangle? Has it been out yet?

There doesn't appear to be much difference in height between the foil and stump. They are going to want to keep it in a pretty tight range of heel.