RORC Caribbean 600 Statement
After a positive start to the race, we sailed upwind around the first corner of Antigua. After Green Island, we had just started reaching and had a good set up after changing sails for the next leg, so deployed our foil and started our race attack with the boat’s speed topping 22 knots.
After reaching for less than an hour, we heard a loud bang from the leeward side and found, to our surprise, that the foil had snapped.
As a result of this, with the heaviest of hearts we took the difficult decision to retire from the race – a tough call given this racecourse really lends itself to our boat. The boat was completely safe with zero water ingress, however having a compromised foil unable to retract inside the watertight foil case, would have affected our performance in a huge way, hence the decision to retire and assess the damage.
The boat had already done over 12,000 nautical miles hitting speeds over 30 knots using the foil with no issues. During our training days we sailed faster with our foil than when it snapped. From our understanding, this is first DSS foil deployed in 33 boats to have failed in 20 years, so this incident will be investigated thoroughly.
Tulikettu’s spirit has not been knocked and we will be back to fight another day soon. Our main goal of the season is the Rolex Fastnet Race, and there will be plenty of training and racing in the meantime before we go out to chase our dreams once again…
