At the show

TheDailySail has a look around Southampton Boat Show

Southampton University (above) were exhibiting at the show and attracting quite a lot of people with a wind tunnel competition. The idea behind it was really quite simple, it consisted of a wind tunnel with a remote controlled boat that was tethered at each end, with the aft most attachment being a strain gauge to measure how much forward ‘pull’ the boat is generating.

The competition was really rather simple, the competitors were given a controller which enabled them to trim the sails. The whole boat was mounted on a rotating circle that allowed people to adjust how close to the wind they were sailing. The whole competition concept was effectively who could get the best VMG score by sailing as close to the wind and quickly as possible, so when you had your best figures they would feed these into the computer and get a VMG score for you.

TheDailySail decided that we would give it a quick go and then proceeded to do everything we could to beat the person at the top of the leader board, sadly no matter how hard we tried we just could not get the boat to sail that high and go that fast. In true sailor style we left the tent muttering about lucky puffs, wind shifts and rule 42 infringements.

Southampton University were not just there to make people become overly competitive with a toy boat, however. The University is actively marketing itself to the marine sector through its Centre for Enterprise and Innovation . If you need some wind tunnel work done, or some hydro dynamics investigated they could be your answer.