Monday Miscellaneous 2–Macquarie Mess: More detail on Macquarie Innovation’s monster crash, and unfortunately it sounds as if the boat is scrap. This comes from the StarBoard windsurfing forum , and excellent site that follows closely the good, the bad, and the ugly of speed sailing at Sandy Point (as well as a lot of other sailing topics; sort of like a southern hemisphere Sailing Anarchy (without all the smack)):
“In a very unfortunate end to the emerging battle for speed supremacy between windsurfers and other craft,right in the heat of the “contest”, Macquarie Innovation (Yellow Pages) has been destroyed during a (very) high speed crash mid run at Sandy Point.
Suffering a front hull lift off at high speed, all effective control was lost at full power and MI slewed around into the wind. And sandbar. The ultimate spinout. Before cartwheeling itself and crew into a horror wipeout.
MI is a write-off but the crew of Simon McKeon (driver) and Tim Daddo (throttleman) luckily escaped without serious injury, despite being catapulted hi in the air inside their crew pod before crashing underwater and being trapped for a few scary seconds.
Data from MI is being attempted to be recovered to determine if the 50 was reached or not, but it’s certain the 500 wasn’t covered, so irrespective the record remains in Finian’s hands for now subject to ratification.”
I asked on the forum for any post-crash analysis, and Ian Fox of the StarBoard Team (who provided the above summary) had this to say:
“It’s a pretty grim scene inside the team container, not much recognizable except for color – or the steering wheel !
There’s no determination yet of actually what went wrong to cause the lift of the bow pod that caused the loss of control which ended the run.
GPS data has been successfully recovered from the wreck and confirms a 47kt crash at 250m into the 500. The actual run was also averaged (to termination) at around 47kts, somewhat below target of 50. So, if had run full distance, it could have been interestingly close with Finian at 46.82 !!
Late on the night of the crash, picking up MI shrapnel floating in the Inlet,
Simon’s famous comment to Tim:” Tim, I think we need a new boat !”
Averaging 47 and in striking distance of 50. These guys are obviously on the right track. Except for that needing a new boat thing, of course…
What Macquarie looks like in one piece…
The Earthist Chronicles 