June 26, 2007
Boat on the Water
I have just finished putting together a short video of our most recent autonomous wing-sailed catamaran test off of Pearl Harbor. We had done a previous test in the harbor, and it worked fine, so we went out to sea and tested several miles off the Oahu coast.
The wind started out very nicely at 17 knots, but this was more swell than we had previously worked with. Based on the experience of the chase boat captain, we aborted the test after 8 nautical miles with the wind at 25 knots, and motored back to our berth. While the data revealed we still had good stability in terms of capsizing, we also discovered that the welds on the rear support beam had broken and were slowly tearing the metal apart.
Click on the image to see the video.
Right call (abort), wrong reason. As always, it is better to be lucky than good.
Posted by elkaim at June 26, 2007 10:13 AM