Thorpe Meeting Novenmber4th

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Fredthecharlie
Established member
Posts: 76
Joined: Sun Oct 11, 2015 5:31 pm

Thorpe Meeting Novenmber4th

Post by Fredthecharlie »

Just a reminder that the November meeting at Thorpe is on November 4th
The address is Thorpe Village Hall Cold Harbour Lane Thorpe Surrey TW20 8TE. Thorpe village is between Staines (M25 J13) and Chertsey (M25 J11) near Thorpe Park.
You need to bring a packed lunch; tea and coffee will be available.
Doors open 9.00am and we finish at 5.00 pm

John Perry
AYRS Chairman
Posts: 104
Joined: Tue Nov 08, 2016 6:39 pm

Re: Thorpe Meeting Novenmber4th

Post by John Perry »

I thought we had a good meeting on Sunday, significantly better attendance than this time last year. Thanks again to Fred and Margaret for making it happen.

As always there was no shortage of speakers to tell us about their current projects, it seems that quite a few AYRS members are active in their workshops and even out on the water but you might not realise that from our publications. I guess that people have ideas and even start to carry out some practical work but they dont feel they should publish until they have something conclusive to report, which can take a very, very long time. The situation in paid scientific work seems to be a bit different in that grants tend to be dependant on publishing papers so researchers are keen to publish anything they can, even just intermediate results.

Altogether we had something like 8 presentations, some long and some short, here is a brief note on a few of them.

Kim amazes me with the productivity of his boat building work. Since we last met he is well on the way to completing a prototype beach rescue craft that may soon be trialled by the RNLI. This is being built to a high standard of finish using a male plug and female moulds to create the fibreglass hull. He also showed us in model form a concept for a hydrofoil craft for use by disabled sailors.

Marcus has aquired a Wharram design cruising catamaran and he told us about his eventful first voyage from Cumberland round much of the coast of the UK to the Medway. I think it is good to include a few tales of seafaring as well as talks about boat design and building, perhaps another time I could show a few pictures from the sailing Josephine and I did this past summer with our 15 foot open boat on the Adriatic coasts of Croatia and Italy.

Mark told us about an idea he has to generate power from low velocity tidal or river currents and illestrated this with a small scale model. I have to say that I am a little sceptical - I would have liked to have seen some estimate of the size of structures needed to extract significant power from low velocity flows such as tidal flows of perhaps one knot or so. Also, an idea of the power losses incured by mutltiple transitions from one form of energy to another. But even so its good to think about these things and great ideas can sometimes emerge from something that doesn't intitially look promising.

New member Lex had a computer simulation sugesting that 8 persons in a rowing eight could produce constant rather than cyclically varying thrust if they rowed 'out of phase' with each other. His computer animation showed that this could be achieved without needing to increase the length of the boat to avoid fists hitting backs, but it would need some overlapping of blades on the recovery strokes only, so new technique would need to be learned. A very interesting idea.

The presentation I gave at the meeting was about the Route du Rhum race which started from St Malo during the course of our meeting. I can say that the first two days of this ocean race has proved to be eventful, with quite a few of the 123 strong fleet already out of the race including three of the six big Ultime trimarans The fleet is battling 30+ knots of headwind and 5m+ waves. Francois Gabart is leading, as many would have predicted, but the highly experienced Francis Joyon is close behind in a much older boat that is well proven (that skipper and boat holds the absolute record for a water-borne world circumnavigation, power or sail). Francis Joyon is 62 years old - some oldies can still sail!

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