I found these photos – they are from 2001 and this is Brett Burvill’s boat,
the first time a modern skiff went ‘two legging it’
The front foil was laminated on – no wand, no flap, no angle of attack control !
The other photos show the first twist tiller mechanism that controlled
the flap on the rudder horizontal foil – which used piano hinge, for well, a hinge.
He ran most of the day on the ‘tri’ setup (from memory) – then whipped this little
chestnut from the van and blew us all away! – Brett foiled for about 50m before
launching himself ‘over the handlebars’ when the front foil went ballistic and did
the best crash ever.
I feel Brett never got full credit for going for it like he did – we all had no idea
of what might happen once you were up only on 2 foils – it was a really cool day.
He carried on like this for a bit until enough was enough and went back to the tri
setup… not long after this John Ilett and myself and brett all switched to foiling
on 2 foils – John investing in the mould (naca 63412) and producing lengths of this
section for us all to use on our boats.
Brett did go on to add another foil half way up the vertical foil to make a ladder
scenario – it worked once but briefly and never came out to play again.
The other photo is of a ‘flying wing’ I made in Nov 2005 (naca 63212) and used for about
2 weeks – AMAC saw this (I took video of it flying and showed him at Melbourne airport –
between flights I was on for work) and from this video – he bought the foil and I became
involved in the R and D at Bladerider. AMAC used it bit and then broke it (bent the pin) later
on the ‘flying wing’ was discarded in favour of the system we now use.
My recollection of the flying wing was that it was good – it was quite hard to launch it out of
the water (a plus – and something we all struggle with still) but the take off was slow and
long like a plane, it did not ‘pop out’ like ours do now.
And finally there is a photo of the ‘media boat’ that I sailed taking on water shots
of everybody – Bretts boat is in the background (with all foils on)
Glen Oldfield
www.compositecomponents.com.au
