We have been working out a plan with the Outremer engineering team to sort out our propeller problems. We have decided to lift Wildling out of the water by crane on Monday next week and will have Volvo engineers check the saildrives to see if there has been any damage from the malfunctioning EWOL propellers. EWOL is still making a replacement set of propellers that will not be ready in time for the crane service, so if the saildrives are OK, we will remove the EWOL propellers and put the original Volvo folding propellers back on. Based on what we find during this process I will decide if we will do another test with the new EWOL propellers, but this will have to be after we move Wildling over to Port Cobières in Marseille.
I’ll take video and photos of the replacement process and will post as soon as I can next week.
Matthieu has posted a bunch of photos from the Outremer Cup regatta on the Outremer Yachting Facebook page. Here are some of Wildling in action:
Crikey!! I see why you were worried about your beautiful boat in that mad crowd! Glad you emerged unscathed!
No kidding! You can get a sense of the craziness in the photos, but what’s missing is that all these boats are going well over 10 knots, so the speed and close distances combined are really scary! I enjoyed the race where we missed the start and began dead last the best. Wildling is pretty fast, so we caught up to the other boats during the race and ended up finishing 5th.