Another day in the tents

Excess wind causes day three of racing to be cancelled at the C-Class Catamaran Championship

With the layday brought forward due to severe weather, the wind conditions also forced the third day of racing at the C-Class Catamaran Championship off Bristol, Rhode Island to be canned.

While the Australians on Team Ronstan have continued the unique drying out process of their wing, the British Invictus Challenge have been working late nights making more significant modifications to their unique split flap wing.

The positive test sail on Friday saw the camber controls for their wing now working effectively, but they have since been working on beefing up the control mechanism for the four flaps that form the trailing edge of their wing. In order to get more leverage on these Saturday night saw the large team from Airbus burning more midnight oil fitting short external carbon fibre spars to the flaps. These are controlled by yet more lengths of 1.5mm Vectran line that feed back into the mast via Harken microblocks and down to the bottom of the wing. Whenever the innards of the mast need to be repaired the transparent plastic covering must be cut away in localised areas to gain access and then replaced with new covering that must be heat shrunk on with an iron when the work is done.

The Airbus team were also busy repairing a daggerboard that unfortunately collided with an uncharted rock while sailing back into Bristol harbour on Friday.

The forecast for Monday is better with 15 knot winds anticipated and hopefully in this bigger breeze the British and Australian teams will stand a better chance of reeling in the dominant Americans.