"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." - Jeff Goll

Back on the water after a two month hiatus. That was rough; mothing was the centrepiece of my physical training program, such as it was. I had to resort to mountain bike riding of all things - tough, but good company. Now back to the water. I am sore after only a short session.

I have learned to multiply my estimated times for any major construction project by about 2.5 to get them to correlate with reality. This is mostly down to job-related issues, but also to my habit of perseverating over design options. There are people who can motor right through this stuff and crank out functional items, but these people are mostly professional, or have done it before in some capacity. When it is the first time and there is no instruction manual, lots of options present themselves. Frequently several are tried before the first one proves the most feasible and achievable - a design orbit of sorts.

The short version is that it works. It is not perfect, and there may be some heartache involved in getting it perfect, but overall I am amazed that it is as close to a functional setup as it seems to be straight out of the box. The amount of empirical guesswork involved in getting to the water yesterday was considerable, and yet there I was, taking off. It does everything it is supposed to do - not always to the proper degrees, but what do you expect with only an hour on the water? At any rate the required steps from here are iterative, in areas where iteration was anticipated and easily accommodated. It is a keeper. Need to sand the foil to something better than 150 now I guess. I am still a bit concerned about breaking foils off, but a lot less so than previously. I should be able to sail this one until v2.0 is ready.

I think I have had a glimpse of the future, but time will tell. It always does.