From: YACHT AMOK – JONES
Sent: May-14-10 4:57 PM
To: John Curry
Subject: AMOK – My New Best Friend

Hi John and Team
Congratulations – your piece of kit got AMOK at 25 Tons and 50 ft of steel safely from Falmouth, UK to Simon’s Town in South Africa without incident.

We took the windward route via Canaries, Cape Verde Is, Ascension Is, St Helena, and Simon’s Town via Cape of Good Hope: about 95% going to windward.

The weather was extreme 38 gusting 42 knts off of Spain for 5 continuous days and a steady 40 knts plus coming around the bottom part of Africa for 4 days. Needless to say we got the waves to match particularly off of the Cape of Good Hope (serious sailors only down there).

After quite a few days of getting to know one another, the hyrovane and I are now friends. We have worked out our differences and now both understand what needs to be done to control 25 tons of steel, 50 ft long. Once that initial period was over we kept challenging it with harder tasks.

If you could have seen how it kept us going to windward at 7.5 knots in mountainous seas with 40 knots of wind off of the Cape of Good Hope with an extremely difficult landfall, you would have been impressed. We were!

So well done for a fantastic product.

Our only problem we had, which was finger trouble is that we lost two retaining pins when taking the rudder off in port, yes we had them tied off?? Allegedly.

Thanks again

kind regards

Mike Jones, AMOK

From: YACHT AMOK – JONES
Sent: May-18-10 7:30 AM
To: John Curry
Subject: RE: AMOK – My New Best Friend

Hi John
No problem at all, you are welcome to post.

Our comments regarding the Hydrovane are honest and as a result of the intense focus that comes from being in an extremely exposed position with your family and realising that the item of equipment performs beyond what could be reasonably expected. There are not too many items of equipment that fall into that category.

This view was not only expressed by me but the rest of my family on board.

For your records we tended to operate the system with minimum vane sensitivity and maximum gearbox power. AMOK is a very powerful Van der Stadt design, getting the balance right was paramount to the success of the system. We were interested to note that with changing environmental conditions both up and down were able to change the boat balance without any alteration to the vane set up. I think the new enlarged rudder was also an important factor in the success particularly with our boat.

We are now residing in Perth, Western Australia

We will be returning to the boat in Simon’s Town, S.A in November and bringing it across to Fremantle over Xmas. A chance to try the system in the Roaring Forties?

Kind regards

Mike, Laura, Pandora (16) and Toby (15)
AMOK crew

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