Today we got to try the ice boat for the first time. It was also the first time the boat was completely assembled so I was a bit nervous. Some minor adjustments where needed and will be needed but nothing major and we where able to sail a bit even if wind was very light. The light wind is the reason why I named the post first shakedown test since basically no stress was put on the construction.
Below some videos showing the preparations and a little bit of sailing. Luckily the sailing was not as slow as on the movie all the time !
As can be seen in the video the spring board is very loose and my experiment with caster angle which makes the bend in the board the "wrong" way will probably require some future attention. Preferably I would like to build a new stiffer spring board and make the caster angle with wedges. This was already noticed in building stage but I decided not to re do it before it was tested. In the light winds we had today spring board worked fine and the idea of using caster angle seemed to work also.
The biggest drawback was the sails. I bought the sails second hand complete with mast and boom and two sails. One sail was a little bit bigger and seemed to be in better shape visually so we tried to put that on the mast first. But there was a problem at the third batten. It looked like the batten was broke closest to the mast. Inspection did not show anything clearly broken! I will investigate that later! So we ended up using the other smaller sail witch fit fine after some minor adjustments.
The sail we used is 5.7 square meters! In the light breeze today I believe the boat could have handled 1-2 squares meters more sail area without problems. So a bigger sail is on the wish list! I think a 7-8 square meter sail would be a good complement to the current sails I have!
All in all the day was good and we had a couple hours of fun on the ice. Hoping ice conditions will stay favorable enabling more sailing! Hopefully with some company so I'm able to get some better video footage.
