Will the Oz Goose fly?

28 March 2019     Editor    3 Comments.

Oz Goose on foils
Oz Goose hydrofoils

GALLERY | Click images to enlarge

Iain Henehan continues his foiling experiments with an Oz PD Goose, an ultra-simple 12ft (3.5m)  plywood club sailing dinghy designed by Michael Storer.

The Goose was introduced as a larger family version of the OzRacer some 6 years ago. But it was overlooked as “just a bigger OzRacer” until three years ago when Ian Henehan in Texas started to put videos of the boat going very fast with one on board (up to 12.9 knots) and sailing well with a payload of two adults and three or four kids.

It became clear that the Goose was a boat with unusual capability. Like a Model A Ford, it is the perfect subject for “hot-rodding”. Much as I love multihulls, I think foiling monos have real potential and now that people like Iain are showing the way - that carbon fiber*, autoclaves and $$$ are just not necessary - cheap, practical and garage-built foilers are just around the corner.

I suppose we have Larry Ellison to blame/thank for the rapid advance of foilers in the past decade. Who knows how many neurons were fired in the minds of men who saw the foiling America’s Cup racers on TV? An example of trickle-down inspiration that actually worked.

Iain Henehan’s Facebook post

The Experimental Aviator


*OK, maybe a teensy bit of carbon fiber.

 

 Hydrofoils  Research

3 Comments

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  • It’s easy to forget that the first few years of successful moth foiling was almost all achieved with timber and fibreglass with only small amounts of carbon or stainless steel.

    It realty is a constructors playground of people working in sheds and sharing information that solved all the problems and brought foiling from a historically quirk into something that would work on all points of sail and in almost all windstrengths.

    There’s so much hype about the carbon tech now that the incredible performance achieved using basic materials by clever people in sheds is forgotten.

    Foils for flying and for stability as well as lower flying (which avoids the bad crashes) truly are accessible to home boatbuilders.

    This article which Ian henehan knows well might help reassess the potential of foiling “for the rest of us”.

    https://www.storerboatplans.com/boat-design/foiling-week-2018-pt-2-foiling-sail-for-the-rest-of-us/

    2019-06-06 16:45 | by Michael Storer

  • Thanks for the comment, Michael. I’m excited about the potential of garage-built foilers. One huge plus for them is easily trailerable aspect - no different than any sailing dinghy, and a far cry from the clever but expensive and/or complex beam reduction methods used for multihulls (considering they share similar speed regimes).

    2019-06-06 19:54 | by Editor

  • I’ll add a further comment about the fabled “trickle down” claims from the America’s cup.

    It was the Moths who solved all the dynamic and control problems well over a decade ago.

    The America’s cup boats don’t even foil or foil efficiently in sub 10 knots.

    That is truly sad as while for most sizes of boats we might conceivably own the speeds for skiff shaped hulls, foilers, sailboards and multihulls might come to a similar speed point in higher wind strengths, it is in the light to moderate winds that foilers excel.

    Foilers can sail two to three times faster than anything else in the (say) 7 to 12knots wind range.

    Last year one of the AC45 foilers joined some of the lake races in Europe, where there is no 10knot wind cutoff, and they did not do very well at all.

    Even the wing rigs came from the C-class catamarans - and it is easy to see with quick examination that the C-class rigs are in a class of their own for lightness and elegance - including the elegance of control as everything has to be done by two people. And again C-class projects are smart guys with limited funds developing stuff in sheds and sharing information (and even sharing boats to help each other out).

    Ellison and the others have thrown huge amounts of money at foiling. But they haven’t dared to push the envelope of performance but rather have played it safe at every point.

    The new monohull AC foilers have so many risks attached that it will be truly interesting to see if they can be tamed sufficiently to be reliable sailers.

    But the thing to watch is just how brave they are with the low wind limit.

    If they chicken out and set it around 9 or 10 knots then the Moths retain the title as the most efficient all round foilers because they do do it on all points of the course whatever the wind from takeoff (somewhere in the 4 to 7kn of wind range) right through to the point where racing is cancelled (again the AC foilers will be going home well before the kids in Optis are forced off the water by the conditions.

    This also points to how hype has clouded many of the public perceptions about where the real work has been done and by who.

    Thanks so much for posting Ian’s work on the homemade foils.

    I really hope that the perceptions can be changed so that more people will play with foils and share their successes and failures with each other so that wonderful synergy that made foiling work in all directions and almost all wind speeds in the first place

    2019-06-06 22:01 | by Michael Storer