FASTTIMES

Great Project! thanks for documenting this for us to enjoy~

cookee

We had a fantastic weekend, lots of people got a ride in the boat and the party at the Island Street bar and Grill was also packed - apparently they broke the record for the number of covers in one night! Tim Tapping was on hand to record the event and a bloody good job he did too!





My favourite:





The stripes and the extension make the boat look even longer now!

Jolley

iTrader: (2)

That is absolutely beautiful !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HabanaJoe

That is soo cool, looks great, nice clean and classic!

cougarman

Very Nice!

Any construction photo's adding the bustle?


Jon

Rik

Looks Great!

cookee

Here's a video from yesterday - we're running at 70mph from 520hp total and over 3000KG without fuel with some larger props both in pitch and diameter on the Arneson 1721's - Rik will tell you how old they are!

YouTube video

cougarman

Very Nice Video

You have to be happy with it all coming together so well.

Jon

Rik

Look's great John!

cookee

We race in the Classic Cowes Torquay Cowes race last weekend - here's how it went:

The dust has settled (or should that be spray?) and we have sorted out what happened and what we need to do.

First of all well done to the winners and especially for Martin Lai who has struggled with that boat from the start.

We drove the boat up by water from Salcombe on the Friday afternoon and had a very uneventful journey. It was good to see the wet pits fairly full of boats when we got there.

The measurement certificate difficulties have continued but they will eventually be sorted out properly once Guy Child (thank you Nicky and Guy) has come down with his measurement certificate - should have called it the BananaShark Cougar - it would have been a lot easier!

Once we had made it down the Solent to the Muster area (glad we had a biggish boat it was choppy going down there!) it was race time and we were looking forward to the race - Jeremy Gibson on the wheel, Graham Lawton on the Throttles and I was navigating with Adrian Everett from E-Lites providing moral support in the fourth seat.

We had problems getting the boat on the plane - our new faster bigger props would not spin up in the lumpy conditions (fine in testing in the flat) meant being at least 5 minutes behind at the start - a navigational error by myself meant we headed off to the Needles Fairway buoy - I had changed everything on the plotter for the new course to two buoys but for some reason it still sent us the wrong way, my fault I should have checked it better.

We caught six boats by Portland and were trailing Jon and Nick by around six miles - when we were approaching Portland we caught a big swell and landed a bit on the side and we think this may have been the start of the end for the trim ram on the Starboard side - we also had an alarm going off but as all of the temperatures and pressures were good we decided to carry on taking it easy at first and increasing speed as we reached the more sheltered waters nearer Torbay. Another couple of awkward landings must have damaged the trim ram further resulting in a very impressive rooster for my wife watching us from Berry Head and a bit of a list to Port!

We were also suffering from a loss of power as we had been running pretty much on one tank and we were getting a little air into the fuel system - with the damage and fuel issues we decided to retire the boat in Torquay instead of the middle of Lyme Bay - we had the boat back at BananaShark and cleaned off by 6pm!

A big thank you go to all of the team and especially Kitten for all of the late nights and our sponsors E-Lites who made the boat look fantastic in the pits (and paid for the fuel and entries!).

We are pleased with the way the boat performed with only the second set of props we have tried - none of the problems are a long term issue - we will turn the rams upside down and look at the size of the skeg, do a little plumbing and we'll be ready for RB12 - see you all at the start!

Rik - I'll send you the photos!