The Race to Alaska - only 40 days until the June 4 starting gun! The new boats are finally getting splashed, the first hurdle of many to come.
The first and only proa to be entered in the race is Team Pure and Wild, launched this Saturday at CSR Marine in Seattle. Designed by America’s Cup foil master Paul Bieker, built by legendary proa builder Russell Brown, and raced by the team of Joe Bersch and Dalton Bergan (I-14 National…
Rudders and centerboards with hydrofoils, profiled arms, wing masts… after the 34th America’s cup, it would be easy to say “we are in the age of wings”. And now it’s not only on multihulls but also on monohulls!
However, wing masts and hydrofoils on sailboats are not a new invention. In 1913 Alexander Graham Bell and Casey Baldwin built Nancy, a hydrofoil sailing model. In 1938, Robert Rowe Gilruth, the “father of America’s human…
I’ve had an interest in hydrofoil sailboats ever since I ever heard about them, when I found ‘The 40-Knot Sailboat’ by Bernard Smith in the Kirkland Public Library as a teenager, which I must have checked out a dozen times. A few years later I was glancing through the Whole Earth Catalog at the neighbors and I saw an entry for ‘Flying Hydrofoils’, published by the AYRS in 1970, which I promptly ordered. So it has been with considerable…
