Notes from Oz  

By Michael Storer - Adelaide - Australia

 

Dakota (age 11) builds a PDRacer.

click for bio

Dakota built one of my OZ PD Racers with some help from her dad Larry It took her three lots of school holidays - about 8 weeks - fitting the work between all the other things an 11 year old has to do.

The middle two weeks holiday it was tooooo cold to do much boatbuilding and they felt a little sad and depressed about the whole venture.

However along came Spring and another school holiday and they finished the boat.

Larry seems like one of those great Dads who can stand back a bit and let someone else find their own way to build a boat - but also to keep the quality up.

The people at the PDRacer Association think that her boat is much nicer than the ones I have built!!!! :-(

It certainly does look smart with the green hull and the white deck.

They took the boat sailing for the first time last weekend.

This is what Larry wrote:

Sunday gave us an opportunity to put it in the water for the first time. A very light southerly (5kts) at Goolwa and away we went. Although I have no Dinghy sailing experience to compare with all seemed good and the boat went well.

Wind dropped off and we were idle for a while. Then a westerly came in around 8kts and we had a couple of good runs and then spent some time trying to get back to shore with a head wind.

Learnt a lot in that short time and had fun. We packed up just as a light sea breeze started, thought about going out again but decided we had achieved what we set out to do and headed home ready for our next big adventure.

The full photo series is on my Flickr site.

More details about the PDRacer on pdracer.info

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