FLICK FISHING
APP OF THE MONTH
A FISHING GAME might not be especially helpful for real world boaters, but Flick Fishing is just too much fun to ignore. Once your kids discover it they’ll spend hours playing it, provided they can prise the phone out of your hands. Designed for phones, not tablets, it’s cheap (US$0.99), simple to play, addictive and has so many realistic variables built in you might actually learn something about fishing from playing it. Choosing your target species, location, weather, light levels, lure type and other real-world fishing factors, affects how much virtual fishing success you enjoy and there are plenty of scenarios from which to choose. Available from Apple’s App store, Google Play
Boat captain Brett Elliott was loving it. “Crusader is a lot of fun in those sorts of conditions,” he says. “The race was pretty different to what we had expected. We spent much longer on the wind and it was much lighter than is normal. Our racetrack took us a long way north which was also not normal. Luckily for a couple of days we also had some great fast downwind conditions, which were great fun. We regularly sat on 18-20 knots of boat speed for long periods. We had a great team as usual and a very competitive division with all of the boats being over 45 feet making the racing very challenging.”
Mid-race, a key sail, the A2 gennaker, ripped. Repairs commenced below deck and Kiwi ingenuity saw the sail back up by the next day. More Kiwi ingenuity was required to find new ways to remove floating debris and rubbish stuck in the keel and rudder. Every night brought four or more backdowns to free fishing nets and other detritus.
Crusader is an Elliott 35 Super Sport; with a moderate beam hull form resulting in low hydro drag and a stability enhancing canting keel. The E35SS can be sailed at high speed with fewer crew than similar size yachts.
Brett Elliott, nephew to designer Greg Elliott, has completed more than 6000 offshore miles in racing and deliveries on Crusader.
“I am constantly amazed at how Crusader handles offshore conditions,” he says. “Sometimes it is easy to forget it’s only 35 feet long. The boat was designed to be a true offshore-capable racing yacht, not an inshore type boat that can be raced offshore at a push, so it’s comfortable and remains surprisingly dry down below with the whole layout working really well.”
Transpac 2015 partnered with The Ocean Cleanup’s Mega Expedition in which numerous entries in the race helped to survey the North Pacific while en route back to the mainland California coast. The aim is to develop a method to deploy a floating apparatus to collect the trash and dispose of it from the marine ecosystem.
Join Crusader www.youtube.com/watch?v=pudy5qsvoqm