The Need 4 Speed
VESTAS Sailrocket 2 with Paul Larsen helming has just smashed the world speed sailing record with a 59 knot average speed over 500 metres! All still to be confirmed and ratified, but this is such a deserved record! ~Mark Jardine
That’s it, we’ve smashed the arse off it! One small step for proa, one giant leap for proa-kind!
A nice write up by Brian Hancock: The Rocket that is a Sailrocket
David Keiper’s Williwaw
Using archival footage, the Int’l Hydrofoil Society has made a short video of David Keiper’s hydrofoil trimaran Williwaw. David built the first flying hydrofoil cruising sailboat in 1970 and subsequently cruised her all over the Pacific. The boat and the voyages are detailed in Keiper’s Hydrofoil Voyager, which is being republished on Amazon this summer.
Zeppy 3 - Across the Med by Wind Powered Airship
Preparations are underway for a 150 mile journey from southern France to Corsica in a sail balloon. High flyer Stéphane Rousson is planning to pilot Zeppy 3 across a stretch of Mediterranean waters using only the power of the wind and a curved carbon foil based on the chien de mer by Didier Costes.
The 65.6 feet long and 16.4 feet wide Zeppy 3 recently on display at Le Bourget in Paris is filled with 200 cubic meters of helium. An…
Hydrofoils on proas
This is Patrick Cudmore’s Seaflier, a solid wing, canted rig, hydrofoil proa built in 1984.
Neither hydrofoil sailboats nor canted rigs are particularly new, but Cudmore’s lightweight proa-configured craft with its cantilevered, articulating wingsall and inverted, elliptical arch, surface-piercing foils offers a glimpse of a future made possible by sophisticated design and strong but light composite plastics. -Keith Taylor, SAIL…
Edmund Bruce was right
Back in the 70’s, Edmond Bruce was cobbling together wind tunnels and test tanks out of duct tape and bailing wire, conducting sailing experiments that were published in the Amateur Yacht Research Society newsletter. Think of him as the ‘Doc Brown’ of sailing and you won’t be too far off. The guy was a genius, one of those who could think “Fourth Dimensionally”.
His primary claim to fame is the invention of an inclined hydrofoil…
Bernard Smith, 1910-2010
Bernard Smith passed away on Feb. 12, three months short of his 100th birthday. He invented a radical sailboat called the aerohydrofoil that had neither a “sail” nor a “boat”, and he outlined his design in his 1963 book, “The 40-Knot Sailboat” . I must have checked that book out of my local library about 20 times! Thanks to Paul Dunlop for the news.
The passing of sailing’s true rocket scientist | Mr. Smith’s Amazing Sailboats
Sail Rocketry
“To one who has turned lifeless materials into a thing alive and forced it to do his bidding against the resisting forces of nature in silence, without fuel and without defiling air or water, there can never be anything more wonderful than the sailboat. “The sailboat never offends the senses of fish, fowl or man. To make it move faster is to make it more a thing of freedom and beauty.”
—Bernard Smith, “The 40-Knot Sailboat,” 1963
When…
First Flight
A working hapa model has finally been accomplished by Frenchman Luc Armant. It is the realization of the theoretically perfect sailboat: an airfoil and hydrofoil, tied together by a single line in tension. The massless sailboat has long been the dream of sailing pioneers from Bernard Smith’s aerohydrofoil to D. Costes’ chien de mer (seadog) to the hapas of J. Hagedoorn. The achievement cannot really be overstated, IMHO. Well done, Mr.…
