I’ve been searching for an explanation for why my Silk 1050 has a tendency to breach on waves waist high and above, thinking it possibly had something to do with my being “overfoiled” (see my post on it here). Then I came across this post about trim and, together with what I learned about overfoil on the other post, I believe I am closer to finding an explanation to my breaching problem. I’ll try to describe what I think is happening and you let me know what you think.
I am motoring along on foil drive. I get to the crest of the wave and rise up above the motor, so that I am now foiling. My front foot had been forward to counteract the upward force caused by the motor. The moment I rise above the motor, all of that front foot pressure causes me to descend. Rather than move my front foot back, which is what I should do, I unweight my front foot, shifting all of my weight onto my back foot. This does in fact stop my descent, but at the cost of loosing speed. Now I’m slowing down while continuing to ascend. This continues until I stall and come crashing down, as though a trapdoor has opened up under me. To summarize, as I decrease my AOA, I ascend and slow down, and eventually stall. If I am correct about all of this, the solution is proper trim. To put it simply, I need to move my front foot back when the motor comes out of the water. This way I can keep the board level and adjust the pitch (AOA) as needed.
It’s not as though I haven’t thought about this before now. I’ve even heard it straight from Mr. Casey himself in his Talk Back Tuesday sessions, which I highly recommend IF you can reliably get video of yourself. Although the saying may go that, knowing is half the battle, the other half of the battle, actually executing on that knowledge, is proving to be far more challenging. Truth is, I haven’t even got to the point where I feel ready to pump, but this post will certainly help when I do get there. In the mean time it’s been a huge help in terms of my conceptualizing what’s going on.