Wow. What a week! Its finally all over, although it feels like we just begun. We had some problems, both big and small, but we overcame them all.
We got second place overall in the sprint. Tom managed to tame the big monster prop. At the start of the race it was pulling about 28kW! Thats 37.5 horse powers in old money.
Team Tarka came 2nd overall! Excellent work guys, excellent work! We picked up a whole host of trophies and awards, so here they are in a list!
3rd Place Qualifying Event
3rd Place Solar Endurance
2nd Place 300 Meter Sprint
3rd Place Visual Display
1st Place Solar Slalom
2nd Place Overall
Outstanding Hull Design Award
Outstanding Workmanship Award
Perseverance Award
Most Improved Team Award
We are all very proud of ourselves and now we have to pack up all the trophies into the crate and see if there is any room for the boat to squeeze in too!
Thanks to everyone for your amazing support, reading your comments and good luck wishes made us smile and really helped to spur us on! I hope you enjoyed keeping up with us on the blog.
Here is an onboard video of our second sprint heat which we ran in this morning. The boat looks real good! (I hope y’all appreciate the American language!)
This morning the awards for workmanship and visual display were given out. We got third place in the visual display and won the best workmanship award. You should have seen the grin on Tom’s face!
We also ran the second sprint heat this morning getting another sub 30 second time, of 29.4 seconds. Still a little way of New Orleans, but good enough to ensure we get second place in the sprint event. It is looking good for second place overall! Will let you know in about 3 hours, so y’all better be staying up!
So we had two pretty long hot endurance races today. Tom and Ted did an excellent job steering a very tippy boat. Wind easily catches under the solar panels and can roll the boat and the solar panels can hit the water. Ted’s excuse was that he was cooling the solar panels down…
Reuben’s telemetry system was the envy of every other team and it worked perfectly giving us the ability to run the batteries flat within 10 seconds of the finishing hooter – amazing!
Both heats were extremely close with the top three teams finishing within 2 laps of each other. New Orleans were the winners at a total of 51.25 laps with Cedarville finishing just 3/4 of a lap ahead of us overall. Laps for Cedarville and Team Tarka were 47.5 and 46.75 respectively.
Later we got awarded trophies for the Endurance, Qualifying and the Slalom.
