About four months ago I took up a new hobby: sailing radio-controlled sailboats. Before buying the first boat, going halves with a friend who was also interested, I checked with some folks in the area who sailed rc boats to see what they were sailing. From a similar investigation several years ago I thought that the Victoria was a popular class for racing, and that was still the case, so that's what we got.

That first boat took several afternoons of work to build, and was built exactly according to the instructions. I knew from several Internet sites that there were several common modifications allowed within class rules that improved the Victoria's performance, but we elected for this first attempt to follow the book. We might modify the boat later, but first we wanted to know how to do it "right." Here's the result, in a swimming pool.

That first sail hooked my friend. We were each going to have a boat. Rather than pay him for my half, I just ordered a new setup and got to work. This one was built with a carbon fiber mast and sail booms, a modified sail control system, and the hull was painted. I offered to make these modifications to my friend's boat, too, but he liked it the way it was. Following testing in my friend's pool, Darter was tested in my friend's backyard lake against his Victoria where both boats performed well.

About the time Darter was finished I discovered The Greater New Orleans Model Sailing Club, which I joined. They race a number of classes, but the most popular is the Victoria class. Also about that time Susan decided she liked little boats, too, so bought and built her own. Little Boat III followed the usual route of testing in the pool, then in the pond, where she showed an amazing proclivity for ramming all and sundry, thus earning her name, Yellow Peril. Also about this time we met Howard Vezinat of Baton Rouge, another member of the New Orleans club, who also had a lake adjoining his yard. Since then we've sailed with Howard several times.

By this time I'd sailed in some practice starts with the New Orleans club in 15 mph winds, much higher winds than I'd attempted before. After about twenty minutes Darter's radio quit working due to water in the rudder control connections - the first of several minor problems caused by high winds that I had to work through. From these practice races I concluded that Darter would do just fine with the smallest sails allowed by the class rules, so I bought some rip-stop polycarbonate-coated kite material and made some. The difference in area between the minimum allowable sail area and the maximum allowable sail area is probably less than ten percent, but I figured every little reduction in high wind would have to help.

I did okay in my first little boat regatta, placing fourth out of six on a cold, windy day. Initially I was slow enough that the first finishers were crossing the line when I still had two legs left to race, but by the end of the eight races in the regatta, I was usually only one leg behind. I even placed third in a couple of the races. Once I led briefly on the second leg, but made one of my typical mistakes and the top sailors didn't, so they went off and left me.

As my second regatta approaches (one was rained out as a cold front came through), I've built new maximum-area sails. I figure that in high winds I'll allow twist in the sails to decrease the heeling, but will need the additional area off the wind.

Speaking of off the wind, the Victoria hull has an interesting tendency to bury the bow when the boat is driven hard off the wind. I've moved the boat batteries as far aft as they can go, but still can't get the hull to plane off in a gust. Instead, the sails drive the bow into the water far enough to halt the boat before the water spits it back out again, backwards. No way I'd want to be onboard for a thing like that.

Well, the second regatta has come and gone. I did better, I think, but the results don't show it. In one third of the races I was right behind the fast group. In one third, something went wrong early, I never recovered, and I finished last. In the remaining third, the mainsheet wrapped around a cleat. I didn't recognize the problem at first, thinking I was just having control difficulties due to high gusts, so was late getting the boat in for a correction. I took a DNF in one race and a DNS in the other. That's a Did Not Finish and a Did Not Start. Both hurt in regatta standings, being worse than finishing in last place.