Morning all,
KitetiK (harryproa) hasn't been out for a while but we had a delightful sail on Saturday. Here's about 50 seconds of video.
We launched the 16m single skin kite from a dinghy. Although the wing tips were in the water for a bit and it could easily have gone pear shaped, it launched cleanly and was very well behaved. The kite pilot had it under control while we in the dinghy returned to the proa, got the anchor up and headed off.
We measured (apparent) wind of 2.8knots at one stage. No doubt there was a bit more at the kite. And it wouldn't have stayed up through that lull if it was much longer - but it did stay up and was very easy to manage when it drifted back. A single very light skin is fantastic!
I think the highest apparent wind speed we measured was 12 knots and it was typically 8-10. So perhaps 6-8 knots of true. When we looked, we were often doing somewhere close to 5knots (the log unfortunately was set to record data only every 5 minutes but from that small sample there were several points around 5knots).
I've been working on RC winch control systems - still more to do on those as, disappointingly, my drills seem to top out at about 10Nm of torque compared with >50Nm indicated by the specifications. Nevertheless, for those of you who haven't seen it, here's me using RC to reel two water containers (about 15kg each) in and out and steer them in my car port. So there is some progress. Although they managed 50kg each, they need to manage at least 150kg. When they are beefed up to take higher loads, we'll experiment further with launch/retrieval systems - but experiments so far have been quite promising. Launching from a dinghy is not a long term proposition and a 16m kite must be near as big as would be possible with that method.
Trevor