First Flight

Mothball 1 has officially had her first flight, it was somewhat brief, but she did fly. I got everything rigged up this morning and hit the water early, the wind was pretty light on the first run and I broke some of the lines on the tramps so I went back in to fit it. When I went back out the wind was up a bit and I could tell she really wanted to fly. The rudder wasn't giving quite enough lift so I had to move way forward to get the boat out of the water but she finely took off and flew for about 10 sec until I ran out of lake. I tacked and headed back the other way and she took off again and really started moving. Everything went quiet and the rudder got really sensitive but she was off and she felt good! Then POW! The sound we all hate to hear. The boat crashed back to the water relatively smoothly and I kept sailing trying to figure out what had broken. The foils were still on, the rig was up, everything was in its place, but she clearly wasn't interested in going onto the foils any more. A brief inspection at the dock revealed the problem, the daggerboard had separated down the middle. Apparently I hadn't bonded the two sides together well enough and it just cracked. Luckily there wasn't any major damage. Spent the last four hours re-bonding the sections and its back out to the lake tonight. I'm kind of amazed this thing actually flew without making any major adjustments on the first day! Yay!