Pardon the background... I need to find a more suitable picture for this page.

This is my cheap and dirty test rocket. It has the beneficial attributes of being easy to build, durable, and easily reconfigurable. It uses the "Robinson Coupling" method of attaching two bottles end-to-end with a 1/8" lamp rod. As shown here it exhibits back-slider recovery, coming down basically sideways. Of course this extracts a performance penalty since it destabilizes as the water and thrust dissipate. In simple terms it gets a case of the wobblies.
Vertically Deployed Tomy Timer Parachute Setup

Or if you would like to see it work: VDTT The Movie