We are continuing our slow progress towards France and are now well into the Bay of Biscay.
Finally, after two frustrating days too close to the coast with not enough wind we were now free to do some Kite-surfing!
The Kite-surf IMOCA 60 project is led by Seb Veniard and Gerald Veniard and has been kindly financed by Temmos Groupe, (who incidentally I know about through a very enjoyable stay at the "Aigle des Neiges" in Val d'Isere!)
The project is in its very young stages and we are using standard Kite-surf material, with bits and bobs adapted to try to make launching, piloting and retrieving the kite easier. So this is really the discovery mode and trials are pretty fun, interesting and slightly hazardous! So today’s results: one kite with a small puncture, one kite with a broken line, three sets of completely knotted lines, a few short flights, several crashes, no lines in the keel or rudders (phew!), no broken bodies and I can't say that we gained much speed towards France during the three hours of trials! But we all learnt a lot today and we will do another set of tests tomorrow having learnt and built on today’s results.
At the end of our Kite session, our two "Mc Gyvers" were a little bit downhearted to have not achieved more flying hours and quite tired from their work so I proposed to share my Christmas dinner (and small bottle of red wine) with everyone to cheer us all up. So, surrounded by dolphins and in the golden sunset we had a delicious beef and carrot stew with pasta (merci Pascal Thailander) followed by some After Eights!
Love,
Sam, R1, Gerald and Seb
