Saving Old Seagulls

Have Oracle put a team in for this year or are they planning to do the race next year? Looks like they've spent a lot of money on a hot 170 engine.

Plenty of pictures of my boat here:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... =3&theater

Not sure about the skunk works boat though. Looks a bit safe!

Will try for another test this weekend with the reduced pontoons. She's leaning on them quite a bit underway, which I don't want. There should be enough form stability in the main hull when she's on the plane. We have some moulds coming for new pontoons next week, so that will be a big step forward.

It should be ok. We’re only really wanting the pontoons to be in the water when the boat is stationary, so I’ll trim 100mm off the bottom before our next test. At speed, the narrow hull is plenty stable enough.

Paris Mk3 out for a test on Sunday.

She's ultra rough and a bit thrown together, but she goes well enough for a first attempt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-renD4tW6cU

We use the standard points ignition. We got similar results with the brown electronic ignition, however we decided to keep things simple and besides, the standard ignitions are faster to change out if we happened to have one fail while we were racing. Personally i'm not big on the recoil starts for ...

Jon, If you want to go fast, i think you should move away from the 102. We don't really have secrets as such, but we did do a heap of testing to get Paris 2 going quick. Paris 2 was a bit of a dog when we first launched her. Slower than the plywood Paris 1 even..... I also think the 5 blade fan is a...

We're using a 4 blade clover prop, very sharp on the leading edge, cut square on the trailing edge. Otherwise we haven't done anything spectacular to the engine. We use a 416 carb and only second hand rings, never new ones. We also paid a lot of attention to how we assembled the engine. Making sure ...

I don't think the revs really matter. It's just the first sound of someone elses engine i've heard in a little while! From my experience most standard engines with no prop work do about 3500-3800rpm depending on their condition. Our engine is a standard silver century and we've been pretty comfortab...

That looks like really good fun. Quite a good swell running there too. Although I've spent so many hours listening to a seagull reving at 5000rpm, that my ears have become very finely tuned to that rev range. Anything below 4700rmp makes me very nervous and I think that we're going to break down. Ps...

Our speed was pretty much the same as last year except we were only stationary for 12 minutes instead of over an hour as we were the year before. I think the main contributor to the good times was the lack of a decent headwind. Aero drag plays such a huge part in low power boats, especially the 20' ...

Lull them all into a false sense of security more like it...... Team Paris makes a multiple entry début in the sport class next year. looking forward to doing more than 12.5mph for a change!

And a short video from onboard Paris:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aaQ4rgec-8

I'll echo the comments of others and also say that John, Ross, Al and Dave once again did a fantastic job running the 31st edition of the race. 30 boats this year with half a dozen purpose built new boats to give us something new and interesting to look at. We were pretty happy with our race effort ...

A couple more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VPQhe27vz8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuaYijHyEJo