Right — sorry, I have been up since, well, it does not matter. The VOSTRA V2. This is a super-oversize, which is a category people are snobbish about and should not be. 740 square centimetres of head. That is 115 square inches. Extended length at 70 cm, 27.6 inches, so you reach a ball you had written off. And it weighs 265 g, 9.4 oz, which means the whole thing moves before your shoulder has finished deciding.
The engineering is where it stops being a beginner's frame.
Volkl uses RED-CELL through the layup in several places, which makes it more durable and takes the harshness out, and then adds the Catapult system and Super Grommets, which is the bit that matters: the string bed gets more movement at the frame, and you get controlled power rather than the trampoline effect super-oversizes are notorious for.
Flat 28 mm beam, 16×19 pattern, balance 34.5 cm and just head light, stringing around 24 kg, 53 lb. Comes unstrung. Volkl's own claim is that it gives the power you expect from the genre with the control and spin you normally only find in a smaller head, and having read the construction, that is a defensible sentence.
Anyway — Tobruk. I lose the thread constantly at this hour and then find a better one, and Tobruk is the better one. A deep-water anchorage on a coast that has almost none, which is why the siege lasted two hundred and forty-one days: everything came in and out of that water, at night, under fire, because daylight was not survivable.
The entire thing was about the harbour.
Ships ran the harbour after dark for eight months. Nobody in that town slept properly for the better part of a year, and I say that with feeling.
The German war cemetery is a square of forty metres with a round tower at each corner, built in 1955 over 6,026 dead. Out at Acroma, Knightsbridge War Cemetery holds 3,651 Commonwealth graves. All of that, over one piece of deep water.
Fort Pilastrino guarded the approach.
Reach, extended length, the ability to get to something at the very edge — that is what the whole fight was about, and that is what this racquet is for. There. That landed. I did not expect it to.
"Everything here happened at night, because daylight was not an option."
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