As you can read in the magazine, the boom itself performed fine but we didn’t like the clamp. The two lips which slide over each other to tighten around the mast were catching on each other and causing the clamp collar to ovalise and buckle, and never allowed a solid connection to the mast during the test. However, we have now since examined several other Chinook clamps of the same type which do not have this problem and which do form a much better mast to boom connection. (See photos A and B)

Chinook assure us that this is a one off problem and they want to reassure Chinook boom owners that their booms are OK, so if you have a Chinook boom and it looks like pic A, take it back! If it looks like the clamp in pic B you’re probably alright.

We are trying another Chinook carbon boom and we’ll report how we find it as soon as we can. In the meantime it does seem to have solved the major problem we found with the boom.