Teenage brothers Gaetan and Antoine Ismael, junior sailors in Annapolis, were looking to take their dinghy sailing higher. After begging their parents long enough, they found themselves sharing a Waszp and together have been helping each other climb the learning curve. The skills they’re learning on foil are transitioning back to their Club 420 racing, but more importantly, their parents say, the brothers are spending more time on the water having fun with flight. We caught up with them at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series to learn more about their new obsession.

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Love it or hate it, performance yachting has taken a quantum leap over the last two decades with the proliferation of foiling, which has permeated throughout the sport—from the America’s Cup to all manners of wind-driven board sports. In Italy last summer, however, a new and curious chapter in foiling arrived with the launch of Roberto Lacorte’s FlyingNikka. The sleek black maxi bears a striking resemblance to an AC75, but at 60 feet, it is far shorter and—significantly—has an original remit for a foiler: to compete in maxi fleet races, both inshore and offshore.

Lacorte, who founded the pharmaceuticals company PharmaNutra Group in 2003 with his M32 sailor and brother Andrea, is a keen sailor. For many years he raced in the maxi fleet aboard his Mills-Vismara 62 racer-cruiser SuperNikka. However, the 54-year-old also prefers speed—his other sport of choice being motorcar racing. Since 2017, he has regularly competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and today races North America’s IMSA SportsCar Championship.

His penchant for speed now extends to his yachting. Initially, Lacorte was going to replace SuperNikka with a longer racing maxi, but after a season campaigning a Persico 69F foiler and inspired by the AC75 and other foilers, he began wondering whether his next maxi should or could fly too.

Given the constraints of creating a minimum-size (60-foot) maxi that foils and take part in conventional races while on a budget with limits and without an army of shore crew, he assembled a team to work on the new project. Led by North Sails Italy’s Alessio Razeto, this included Nacra 17 Olympian Lorenzo Bressani, project manager Micky Costa, and Mark Mills leading the design. Brought on board for R&D was KND, while Pure Design & Engineering handled the engineering. Nat Shaver (ex-ETNZ and American Magic, now INEOS Britannia) designed the foils. King Marine in Valencia built and assembled the boat, while Re Fraschini in Italy fabricated the foils.

Mills says he was initially skeptical whether FlyingNikka could be created without America’s Cup resources, but he eventually concluded that such a foiler could be realized if it were kept simple, meaning free from the constraints of the AC75 rule: A motor could power the hydraulic package, controlling almost everything from sails to foils, reducing crew, and making grinders and cyclors ­redundant. Similarly, with no restrictions, ride height and pitch could be controlled automatically.

After six months spent examining all options, including IMOCA-style retracting Dali foils, FlyingNikka’s design was unveiled with an AC75-style “flip-up” foil-cant arms configuration.

Aside from its size and intended use, FlyingNikka has two significant differences to an AC75. The foils cant up to weather and down to leeward like an AC75. However, they develop lift by altering the pitch of the entire wingspan (i.e., the whole wing articulates laterally around the bottom of the arm, typically from zero to 15 degrees), unlike the AC75 system where the foil arm and wing are fixed and lift develops from an airplane-style flap on the wing’s trailing edge.

This neatly avoids a significant issue of AC75 foil design and ­engineering, making a flap that operates reliably on the back of a bendy T-foil. FlyingNikka’s simpler flap-free arrangement means more freedom for its foils to deflect and the wingtips to unload. Altering the incidence of the entire wing also produces significantly more lift compared to a flap, in theory enabling the boat to take off in lighter winds.

Significant too is that while an AC75’s wings are ballasted—made of lead and steel, and some with lead bulbs—FlyingNikka’s wings are made from carbon fiber instead. Being substantially lighter, they have been far easier to engineer and manufacture.

Working in conjunction with the main foils is the rudder elevator. Its lift adjusts by raking the entire rudder. The ­bottom bearing is mounted in a transom scoop, where the rudder stock rotates about a vertical axis as usual and a lateral axis to permit the elevator to be raked by plus or minus 6 degrees via a hydraulic ram pushing and pulling the top of the stock.

To enter traditional races, FlyingNikka must comply with the Offshore Special Regs’ Category 3 STIX stability requirements, so it has a keel, which an AC75 does not. At 2,000 kilograms, this keel is small but significant given the boat weighs only 7 tons. Two extra tons on a foiling boat is costly—Lacorte reckons it chops 4 to 5 knots off their top speed. The keel, however, does have several benefits. Along with the arm of the leeward foil, the keel prevents leeway. Between the foil arm and the keel, FlyingNikka enjoys “negative leeway” (like boats with a trim tab on the keel). It also means the foils don’t need to be ballasted (unlike the AC75). It does, however, lose the righting-moment benefit of an AC75’s ballasted foil when it cants to weather.

Significant for FlyingNikka’s intended use in light winds, the keel makes the boat more manageable and less likely to capsize when its foils are providing minimal lift. In practice, it also smooths the transition between flying and displacement modes. In the future, the team might make record attempts when its keel could be removed, although it would still need some arrangement for the engine water intake (otherwise located in the keel).

The boat was first launched in early May, and its successful flight at the very outset was most remarkable for such an experimental platform. This was mainly down to the R&D effort put in by the design team, and especially its access to America’s Cup CFD and engineering tools. Since then, FlyingNikka competed at the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup in Sardinia and at Les Voiles de St. Tropez. The latter was disappointingly windless, although valuable lessons were learned about how to sail it in displacement mode. But Lacorte showed the boat’s extraordinary potential in the former, starting last in its own class and sailing through the fleet.

To enter fleet races, the boat has been given a stratospheric IRC rating of 3.866, so it is unlikely ever to win under corrected time. (The previous IRC TCC high scorer was the ClubSwan 125 Skorpios at a mere 2.149). Lacorte seems satisfied simply being out on the racecourse.

In terms of performance, FlyingNikka is not designed for peak speeds, although the sailing team managed 27 knots upwind and 38 knots downwind at respectable angles, with more to come. The boat, including the foil package, is designed for conditions typical of the Med, i.e., light. As a result, it has larger foils, requiring less wind to take off, which comes at the expense of top speed. Downwind, FlyingNikka needs around 9 knots of wind to fly, 10 to fly well and 12-plus to achieve optimal VMG, at which point it is ­making close to 30 knots.

The team is examining how to best sail the boat in displacement mode when it is too light to foil. Far from being a complete write-off, the boat can still make good progress relying on its ultralight displacement and substantial sail area. Trickiest is the transition between nonfoiling and foiling because there are techniques such as sailing lower angles or increasing foil rake that can permit early takeoff. But the poor VMG and excess drag required to achieve this can be slower than sailing in displacement mode.

Lacorte is also learning the oddities of handling a boat that can sail at more than twice the windspeed. While foiling, the apparent wind angle is rarely more than 50 degrees, even downwind. Upwind can be only 19 degrees.

All foiling boats require slightly different techniques to perform maneuvers well and remain airborne. “You have to move and steer a lot,” Lacorte explains. “It is different compared to a normal boat. It is necessary to maintain flow over the foil, to keep pressure on it, and carry out maneuvers in a strong, fast way. Then you generate incredible G-force, like a sports car. You have to hang on, otherwise you risk falling overboard.”

With Lacorte, there are just five crew, thanks to the engine-­powered hydraulics and automation. As with the AC75, the crew resides in fore- and aft-oriented trenches, with the helmsman ­forward to windward with a screen and a wheel in front of him, and the flight controller forward and to leeward. Aft are the mainsail and headsail trimmers, who swap sides during maneuvers. Farthest aft, the navigator and the systems operator are stationary. Each crew, including the driver, controls an array of waterproof buttons operating the hydraulics, including some safety ones too, such as to dump sheets. Dropping and raising the foils is done via foot pedals. Inboard of each cockpit is a powered winch used for the A1 sheet, halyards and furling lines.

Part of the secret to sailing FlyingNikka is the automation of the foil wing’s articulation in conjunction with that of the rudder elevator rake. This, for example, enables the crew to adjust ride height and fore and aft trim continuously. At split-second ­intervals, the automation then adjusts the pitch of the foil wing and rudder rake to make this happen. This requires the software to be trained, partly through the crew teaching it, but also through its own intelligence, learning from how the crew operate the boat. Also vital is the system continuously knowing the exact orientation (pitch, yaw and roll), movement and acceleration of the yacht. As a result, FlyingNikka is littered with rate gyros and accelerometers ­monitoring its every motion.

Essential too is the speed of the hydraulics. To ensure maximum performance, the system operates at a substantial 500 mb of pressure, so there is no need for stored power, although it does require the engine to run constantly.

Above the deck, the rotating rig is a conventional two-spreader affair but without runners. The mainsheet provides much of the forestay tension. Given the boat’s speed, sails are ultra-flat and the wardrobe is limited—just a mainsail with a low telescopic boom (outhaul controlled by the boom being pumped in or out at the gooseneck), with a deck sweeper and three jibs, the smallest on an inner forestay, plus an A1 for use in displacement mode. The aim, according to sailmaker Alessio Razeto, is to have the minimum sails necessary to get the boat flying because they become drag rather than driving force and need to be reduced rapidly afterward.

FlyingNikka is capable of all “the foiler moves,” flying both downwind and upwind, and foiling jibes and tacks. These will be refined with practice, but it is this voyage into the unknown that Lacorte and his highly experienced crew relish. And where FlyingNikka is breaking new ground is in Lacorte’s desire to race it offshore. Typically, this type of foil configuration doesn’t like waves—foils suddenly stop working when they are not immersed—while a flying hull colliding with a wavetop can damage crew and the boat due to the deceleration and the resulting loads. However, Lacorte says he is pleased with how well FlyingNikka is performing in 6-foot waves thus far. This is partly due to the AC75-style “bustle” (the long, shallow skeg that runs down the length of the hull’s centerline), designed to ease the transition between displacement sailing and foiling. It is also due to the boat’s center of gravity being quite far aft, which means it typically touches down stern-first. Razeto admits his biggest fear is “an uncontrolled takeoff with the bow up.” Normally, it is the back of the boat that lands first when this happens. “We have done that a couple of times,” he says. “With a nosedive, a lot of water comes over the boat, but it is not really dangerous.” However, the stern reimmersing first appears to be substantially less dramatic than going from foiling into a giant nosedive.

With its first Med season in the books, modifications are currently being made to FlyingNikka before next year’s 151 Miglia-Trofeo Cetilar, followed by the Rolex Giraglia and the Rolex Middle Sea Race. Female tooling for FlyingNikka remains at King Marine, ready for any additional brave individuals with a craving for speed to buy into Lacorte’s vision with a budget that Lacorte reckons is less than that of a Maxi 72.

The post The Flying Maxi appeared first on Sailing World.

Garda is sailing’s amphitheater, a place with a sailing culture unlike any other. Centrally located in Europe and with clinical conditions, it is also the heartbeat of international wind sports. In the cradle of the Italian Alps, it is completely normal to run across boats from Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and everywhere else. With a whistling northerly Pelér in the morning and a warm Ora southerly in the afternoon, Garda is blessed with two distinct world-class sailing conditions for much of the year. And the scenery is the most stunning of any sailing venue. All of this is to say there really is no finer place for one-design sailors, wingers, kiters and foilers to play, which is why Waszp sailors gather once a year for Foiling Week, and this year the official Waszp Games and World Championship.

While Garda is known for being a near-perfect spot and easily accessible to those in Europe, getting there from Hawaii is anything but a straight shot. But it is worth it. To get to Garda this past July, I negotiate through four canceled flights, 10 days of delayed baggage, and a bunch of other annoying hiccups until I finally reach my final terminal in Verona, Italy.

But this time, I arrive with no bags and no gear.

No worries. I’ll figure something out.

Running on four hours of sleep in 48 hours, bleary-eyed and buzzing, I hitch a ride to the yacht club in Malcesine with my coach, who is here on holiday. I find and set up my charter boat and accept that my bags might not show up for a long time. But I need to go sailing, so I plan to buy a pair of boardshorts and a life jacket using the small allowance from the airline. I also plan to check out everything Foiling Week has to offer, including its extensive collection of foiling craft. There isn’t any other event I know of where so many fleets and high-performance sailors, designers and fanatics come together to geek out on foiling.

At the club, I quickly experience the generosity of this foiling community. I, a relative stranger, am able to secure a sail and foils before the first race starts the following morning. I hit the pillow hard that night, sleep-deprived and jet-lagged.

Fortunately, sailing events in Garda have a relaxed schedule. Our briefing isn’t until midday, so I hop over to one of Garda’s many stocked sailing shops and lay down my precious euros for a pair of boardshorts and a life jacket for racing. On the water soon after my shopping spree, I can sense the jet lag. I’m not as sharp as I need to be, nor as smooth as I have to be.

For Foiling Week, the Waszp fleet is assigned to course racing. This means our races, which are normally 20 minutes everywhere else, will be more than 40 minutes long. At this point in the regatta, I’m focused on figuring out the quirks of my charter boat. In tricky and variable conditions, I move up in the standings with every race, which feels darn good at the end of the day. But for this regatta, it’s not the scores that matter to me; it’s the chance to meet new people, to train and have a good time while I’m still young. Everyone here is happy.

Once Foiling Week wraps up, there’s a week before the Waszp Games and World Championship officially start. While Foiling Week is a significant event with nearly 70 boats competing, this regatta has an absolutely insane number of entries: 160. Every day the boat park gets more packed as Waszps roll in on trailers and inside travel boxes, portaged by sailors from far-flung places like Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. This year there are 30 girls signed up to race, one of whom is New Zealander Elsie Beavis, who placed second in the pre-Worlds regatta (and would go on to win the women’s world title in Garda).

To my surprise, my bags arrive the day before the World Championship begins, so after some minor boat tweaks in the final afternoon training session, I’m on to the main event the following morning.

The Waszp Games, where all 160 sailors will be racing in well over 20 knots, is next-level stuff. The talent in the gold fleet has risen so rapidly over the past year that a winner of the last major event these days can hardly crack the top 10 at the next regatta. But there are plenty of beginners here too because new sailors can register for the green fleet, where they get coaching in tandem with the Games event happening nearby.

The first challenge of the Games is the slalom. This format is unique to the Waszp class, where groups careen down the racecourse from a reaching start, then sail downwind through a series of marks in rounds of knockout qualification, with a quarterfinal, a semifinal and a three-round final. For this insanity, Garda delivers. A clear sky and nonexistent wind in the morning get the afternoon’s Ora wind engine cranking early ahead of the noontime church bells. It comes on fast and hard, and with miles of fetch, the chop is something else.

The perfectly flat water of the past few weeks is now gone, which leaves everyone scrambling to change settings to deal with the added challenge of battling chop. Having left the ramp immediately after the wind started to fill, my boat is set for the wrong conditions. So, as it gets windier and choppier, I’m way out of tune and struggling. With little practice in the short chop with my flat-water settings, I limp through the slalom, barely making it to the quarterfinals.

Once I’m back on shore, though, I can appreciate the spectacle of the slalom. At such a high level, the slightest mistake anywhere on the course instantaneously shuffles places. And this is what eventually happens to the slalom’s overall leader, who wins the first two races of the finals but becomes airborne on one last jibe, stacking it within throwing distance of the starting line and coughing up the title to one of his fellow countrymen.

One great practice of the Waszp class is the daily fleet debrief, led by the person who did the best for the day. Discussions include the top-of-the-line starting strategy, body movement in the chop and higher sensitivity, all of which I will attempt to apply in the course races to come.

With the slalom portion out of the way, the championship racing gets underway. To manage the insane amount of boats, organizers split the fleet into gold and blue fleets, and there’s the green fleet, which goes out with coaches to practice and hone boathandling. For the first day, I’m in the blue fleet, racing on the western side of the race area, close to the lakeside village of Lemone. This racecourse is less windy and wavier than the other course off the shore of Malcesine.

Once racing starts, it’s clear the left side of the course is significantly windier and flatter. But the wind slowly clocks to the right throughout the day, leading to large gains on the right on the later races. Some interesting discussions are brought up in the briefing after racing, and the conclusion is that the people who are doing the best are the people who are actively adjusting their ride height while foiling. Changing ride height from tack to tack allows better control in the different areas of the racecourse, allowing for minimal drag in the flatter water and higher control as chop becomes more of a factor.

On the final day of qualification, I’m somewhere in the mid-20s, well deep into the gold fleet, but there are 15 boats within 10 points. The wind is definitely lower, and I’m assigned to racecourse Alpha, off Malcesine, where the puffs are up to around 14 knots while some parts of the racecourse are below 5 knots. In these conditions, I have the best race of my event, where, with an advantage through maneuvers, I’m able to round the last upwind mark first.

My proud moment is short-lived, however. I sail into a windless hole, and the boat plummets to the water, allowing seven boats to soar past before I can get it back up and flying. I manage to get four of them back on the downwind leg, reclaiming valuable places.

Back on the Bravo course the next morning, ­conditions are similar to the previous day, except it is flatter and a bit less windy. It’s quite clear to everyone here which side of the course is best, which only makes it—and the fleet—more compressed.

My first day in the gold fleet is… How do I say it? Fierce. The wind is up from the previous day, and the starts are so hard-fought that the first three are general recalls. Even under a black flag, the racing is elbows-out. After every start, I find myself playing catch-up, and before one race I realize I’ve forgotten to put the plug in the boat. I’m able to make it back out for the final race and feel OK with my two results for the day. But I’m annoyed by my easily preventable mistake.

The last day is the windiest of the gold fleet racing, and with a 70-boat fleet racing around at 20 knots, the sailing area is manic. Starting again on course Alpha, the strategy play is deciding between dipping into Malcesine to score a puff or attempting a bunch of tacks up the narrow band of the best wind. With each leg of the course it seems different strategies pay off indiscriminately and the fleet gets turned on its head every time. Like getting to these Games, I remind myself nothing in Waszp sailing is easy at first. But once you get it wired, everything is not only fine, but some of the best experiences possible on water.

My final standing in the championship is 32nd, which is not bad in this competitive fleet, but it’s not quite how I wanted to finish. The experience, however, leaves me with the knowledge to compete stronger in next year’s event in Sorrento. It also motivates me to advance the level of Waszp sailing at my home club and elsewhere. Because when going to a world-level competition, it’s not only racing skills that get developed, but also the connections and friendships that allow sailing to grow and expand as it does in Garda.

The post Waszp Fun and Games appeared first on Sailing World.

Back in the day, when I ­captained my college football team (cue up Springsteen’s “Glory Days”), I always felt a little nervous during the ritual of pulling on the pads, when the adrenaline and butterflies started to simultaneously stir. Last July, I’m having a deja-vu moment of that particularly unpleasant sensation as I’m handed a helmet, wetsuit, rash guard and life jacket moments before heading out for my first-ever attempt at helming a foiling craft, the Persico 69F. The name is derived from the boat’s 6.9-meter length (which translates to 22 feet, 7 inches).

The fledgling one-design class’s welcoming motto is “foiling for everyone,” a notion I am definitely about to put to the test.

After a pair of previous winter events in Miami for a half-dozen international “youth teams” (25 and younger) and an appearance at South Carolina’s Charleston Race Week, the 69F roadshow has rolled into Newport, Rhode Island, as part of the New York Yacht Club’s Race Week. This is the fourth stop on the American 69F opening season’s stateside circuit. Still ahead is a mixed series with the NYYC; an event in Halifax, Nova Scotia; and the grand finale in Pensacola, Florida, the 69F Cup presented by American Magic. That makes sense because the 69F is purportedly the only other crewed foiling monohull outside of the America’s Cup.

The 69F ringleader in the United States is Miami-based Alex Sastre, a sailing-crazed yacht broker and promoter (a separate 69F European circuit is under different management). Sastre’s 69F mantra is simple: “We are training the next generation of sailors.” But he’s also organizing foiling academies for adults outside of the youth initiative, presumably for numbskulls like me.

One of Sastre’s right-hand guys, a very patient young man from Italy named Pietro Luca who has drawn the unlucky straw of taking me out, gave me a 69F once-over: the pre-preg carbon construction (the boat is built in Italy by Persico Marine), the square-topped mainsail, the V-shaped lifting foils, the T-shaped rudder, the lifting fin and so on, and finally, the handhold for gripping while steering. “Very important,” he says. It’s pretty much the only thing I can concentrate on.

Assuming the helm, with the sails still down and no warning, Sastre tows us out to Narragansett Bay on a big RIB doing Crazy Ivan at about 25 knots, which of course gets us up and foiling immediately, and is easily one of the most terrifying and unexpected moments of my life. “Just follow the outboard!” Luca shouts helpfully.

And then the sails go up. I start to slide up onto the rack, at which time I sky the 10-foot-long tiller extension—which careens us off on a broad reach and into a capsize. Approximately 20 seconds into my initial fling at foiling, we are swimming. Sheesh, how embarrassing. Given the circumstances, Luca is much gentler and more understanding than I would’ve been. Grazie, Pietro.

With a 12-knot southwesterly sea breeze filling in, we shake ourselves off, get everything and everyone back on their feet, sheet it all home and, holy smokes… “Here we go,” Luca says. “You’re up. You’re flying!” 

Every sport, at every level, needs a face, someone recognizable to make it personal and relatable. The next day, spearing around the 69F racecourse riding shotgun with Sastre on the RIB, my connection to the real foilers who actually know what they are doing is personified by a diminutive Hawaiian sailor named CJ Perez. At 5-foot-4, Perez is slight in stature but casts a huge shadow over her fellow competitors. At one point, we grab a young Swedish sailor to transfer from one boat to another, and we ask him who in the fleet he is looking out for. “That would pretty much be CJ,” he says.

The New York YC race committee has commandeered the southern half of the bay for its race circles, so the six-boat 69F fleet is towed (with dispatch) to race just north of the Newport Bridge. It takes a while for the sea breeze to fill, but once it does we are joined by more foilers—a flurry of Moths and a trio of Nacra 17s—all zipping around with the 69F skiffs. Point proven for Sastre. “This is what I said! This is the newest generation of sailors!” he beams.

There are six races ­scheduled for the day, with the first three laid out on a triangle course as the first wisps of the new southerly darken the waters. Before long, there is a solid breeze. Even a dunce like me understands that with foiling boats, the longer you’re on the foils, the better your odds to, ahem, foil the competition. And the dude from Sweden is correct: On this day, nobody is more dialed in than CJ Perez.

It’s no wonder. At 18, with three years of competitive sailing under her belt, she’s nothing less than a prodigy, a two-time world champion in the O’pen Bic class; the 2021 US national champ in the Waszp foiler; and the first American female to win a race on the SailGP circuit, which she did in Cadiz, Spain, last year aboard Team USA.

On my unofficial scorecard (these are preliminary training races, with the real ones scheduled for later in the week), Perez takes a close second in the first race, then absolutely crushes everyone in the next two. Nobody can match her skills getting airborne and ­staying there.

The race committee relocates the circle and sets up a quadrilateral-shaped course for the final trio of matches, which unfortunately concur with the dying of the breeze. That means the 69Fs plod around the course in mainly displacement mode, considerably leveling the playing field. Once grounded, Perez finishes those three contests in middling fashion.

Afterward, I catch up with her on the beach, where she is derigging the boat, and ask how she got involved with the 69F.

“I saw it on Instagram. I thought it was super cool,” she says, echoing Sastre’s remarks that the class has a huge presence on social media and uses it for both promotion and recruitment. Kids these days, right?

She’s pretty happy with her performance in the first three races, not so much in the final three. But she shrugs it off, mentioning that she is missing her regular flight controller, and her two crewmates weighed in at about 40 kilos apiece. Her competitors, some of which have three crew aboard, have a distinct weight advantage in displacement conditions.

“It’s so hard on foiling boats when you don’t foil,” she says. “Just super frustrating. When you have more flying time than everyone else, you’ll be in front.”

She makes it sound easy.

That said, Perez makes no secret about her ambitions. “I’m a foiler,” she says, making it clear that the concept of being a mere sailor wasn’t a major priority. “And I’m here because I want to be part of a team and learn to work with a team. In the future, I want to race in SailGP and the America’s Cup, which is all about teamwork. This is a stepping stone.”

Then she’s back to work. And I am left with the distinct impression we’ll all be hearing a lot more about Perez down the line.

We are trucking. At least, in my world. I catch 17.4 on a quick glance at the speedo before my attention is drawn constantly elsewhere. (Sadly, I later learn the top speed recorded in a 69F is 34 knots, twice what I thought was epic.)

But enough about the future; back to my own first moments of flight. I’ll admit a trained chimp could’ve handled my job because Luca and a young woman from Argentina handle all the necessary flight controls. The one thing I have going for me is that I’ve tacked out of Narragansett Bay on a summer southwesterly a million times, so once we get the whole show up and running, I can pick out a landmark near all the old familiar Narragansett Bay shoreside attractions (Castle Hill, Beavertail) and aim directly for it. Still, things seem to be happening quickly. Luca’s instructions, after chiding me not to oversteer (more swimming was not on his agenda), are along the lines of what you might hear in a gym from a personal trainer: “Up! Down! Up! Down!”

But we are trucking. At least, in my world. I catch 17.4 on a quick glance at the speedo before my attention is drawn constantly elsewhere. (Sadly, I later learn the top speed recorded in a 69F is 34 knots, twice what I thought was epic.) At the mouth of the bay, off Castle Hill, the incoming breeze and outgoing current kick up some pretty good seas, and I catch more than one complete wall of water to the kisser. Good, wet times.

I will confess to being a bit chagrined when I later saw the photos of me steering from inside the boat, with a death grip on the handhold because I was terrified of losing control of the tiller if I again attempted to scoot out on the rack. But still, like mountain climbers who summit Everest and take a snapshot at the top, it’s proof of foiling.

Near Beavertail, a local ­hotshot sailor and friend of mine, Glenn Walters, swaps driving positions with me, and I’ll admit that the conditions are considerably more gnarly for him. But when they capsize soon after, I am somewhat relieved. Once ashore, I thank Walters for making me feel better, and he snaps, “I wasn’t driving then.”

OK, sorry bud.

As it happens, I run into the 69er squad at a downtown Newport joint called Pour Judgement later that night. Yes, I’ve been celebrating my mastery of foiling. And here I’d like to remind everyone that even small victories are victories. As in, with sheepish smiles all around, Sastre says to me, “I asked them which one of you was the best driver, you or Glenn. And they say you are the funniest…”

Always enjoy those tiny wins, my friends. So, foiling for everyone, eh? If nothing else, regarding that motto, I consider myself a living example.

The post First-Time Foiler appeared first on Sailing World.

The first event in US waters for the Persico 69F Youth Foiling Gold Cup international circuit attracted little attention, perhaps because its outreach depended almost entirely on cryptic social media. But in the end, Team Argentina came out on top in the kickoff. Nacra 17 Olympians Dante Cittadini and Teresa Romairone were joined by Marcos Fernandez, twenty-somethings setting a standard for what it takes to win. Among US hopefuls, Team Sail America was skippered by University of Rhode Island’s Henry Lee. Arthur Serra, of San Francisco, California skippered Team StFYC, representing St. Francis Yacht Club’s high school program. Also traveling east to race was StFYC high school senior Declan Donovan driving Team Thailand. US sailors represented development efforts, looking for first experiences and thrills. Donovan survived to the Finals. He and Serra share their stories here, adapted by permission from the St. Francis YC’s Mainsheet newsletter, published in March 2022.

Can’t Wait

By Arthur Serra

Last fall I saw an incredible boat on Instagram. It looked like a small AC75. It had a similar foil setup, with three big sails, and it was going fast. I poked around on the Internet until I found the Persico 69F. At the time, the St. Francis YC Junior Program sailed only Lasers because of COVID. I love the Laser, but it’s good for 4 knots upwind and 12 knots downwind. The boat on my screen was cranking upwind and downwind at 25 knots and reaching at 30. I was hooked.

I researched it whenever I had time and finally got an email address for somebody from the class association. After four months of emailing them every week I got the reply I was looking for. “There’ll be boats in Miami starting in January; come sail them by yourself or with a buddy.”

I was elated and invited my good friend and fellow junior sailor Caspar Lenz Anderson to come along. Our last week of Christmas break, on the first day of the new year, we flew out of SFO and arrived in MIA. The day after, we went out to sail the boats and break our personal speed records. We showed up an hour early. We were so excited we couldn’t help ourselves. The instructors were surprised. The home office in Italy had communicated about two “kids” coming to sail. They expected beginners wanting joyrides. Instead, what greeted them were two 16-year-old, highly-energized racers ready to go. That changed their plans for how much sailing we would do.

First, our instructors gave us a lesson on the 69F. What makes these boats special are the V-shaped foils on either side. These are akin to AC75 foils and make the boat incredibly stable. Normally, only one of these V-foils is in the water, and they produce not only upward lift, but also massive righting moment. The V-foils counter the force to leeward generated by the sail. This makes the boat want to stay flat (as compared to a Moth or Waszp, which constantly want to capsize under an overpowered rig). With so much righting moment, sails can be bigger, so the boat accelerates faster and foils sooner.

There are three positions: skipper, mainsheet trimmer and flight controller. While adjusting the rake of the foils to manage the ride height, the flight controller also works with the skipper on tactics and focuses on the gennaker when sailing downwind, watching for puffs and lulls. The mainsheet trimmer has one job, and it’s in the name. All the main trimmer does is trim, except when jibing. The boat needs to sail as flat as possible at all times. Even a slight leeward heel in a small puff can cause the boat to capsize, so the trim has to be on point. Of course, the other way to manage heel is by changing the angle to the wind. That’s where the skipper comes into play. The skipper’s job is the same as on any boat: drive, play the angles, and keep everyone working together.

We rigged the boats, launched and towed out. The boats are simple once you get a good look. There’s a large self-tacking jib, a huge main trimmed from the boom, and a big kite with a retrieval line. The controls, sails and most of the normal sailing aspects are like a 49er’s. What’s different are the foils. Both the centerboard and the rudder are T-foils, recognizable to anybody who’s seen a foiling Moth.

The V-foils, which descend at forty-five-degree angles from either side of the hull, are dropped and lifted during tacks and jibes. The V-foils and the rudder foil rake are adjusted using lines that lead to the front of the boat, and these are adjusted by the flight controller to initiate foiling and maintain proper height. Because a trapeze can be dangerous, and this class is all about safety, the 69F instead has hull extensions, “hiking racks,” where crew members sit outboard. Over the next four days, we learned how to foil, twice raising our personal speed records out of the high teens.  Now it’s 28 knots. Going that fast the boat feels light and playful. It’s a heady experience.

We started as flight controllers before moving on to skippering and mainsheet trimming. We worked hard on communication. Never before had we sailed a boat where skipper and trimmer need to be in sync to the point that even a momentary lack of concentration leads, at best, to falling off the foils and, at worst, to a capsize. By the second day, Caspar preferred trimming and I preferred driving, so we spent the next two days like that and became really synchronized. Our jibes and tacks weren’t perfect, but we could keep the boat going fast in a straight line. The first three days we zipped around Biscayne Bay, blasting past Hobies.

The fourth day lacked wind, so we went to the ocean to catch more breeze. We got the boat ripping, but to make our flight back to San Francisco we had to foil home through the shipping channel. We asked for permission from the Coast Guard but forgot to check with the harbor police, so when this strange contraption came flying into a busy channel, a high-speed chase ensued. We gave ourselves up. The police pulled us over. Luckily, it mattered when we told them the Coast Guard had given us permission. After all, they have bigger guns.

Now it can be told: We got stopped for sailing too fast. How cool is that?

The 69F is sailed in the Youth Foiling Gold Cup, a world tour Grand Prix series – think SailGP for under 25s. The first “act” of the 2022 Cup was in Miami, and we were there because the instructors on our second day made an offer we couldn’t refuse. Come back in February, they said. Come back and race. They knew we were hungry for more, and a team from the Bahamas had dropped out. We jumped on it and quickly added Sydney Lange, another member of the StFYC Junior program, to manage flight control. Caspar continued as mainsheet trimmer, and I skippered. Together, we represented St. Francis Yacht Club, competing against eight other teams – including another representing St. Francis with Declan Donovan driving. 

We gave it our all and coming back from Miami after our loss there are feelings of disappointment, but honestly, I’m inspired. We raced against some of the best youth sailors, and seeing them absolutely destroy me shows the work I have ahead. I can’t wait.

Going for the Goals

By Declan Donovan

I had never sailed a 69F, but there I was, skippering Team Thailand and representing StFYC at Act 1 of the Youth Foiling Gold Cup. My teammates were Dylan Whitcraft, our main trimmer from Thailand, and Ella Beauregard, flight controller. Of the three, Dylan was the only one who had previous experience in this fast, foiling boat. We faced a major learning curve. Fortunately, the format of the 69F YFGC Series provides practice time ahead of the regatta. Unfortunately, our two practice days were not optimal. Mother Nature turned Biscayne Bay into a light wind lake. But let’s consider the format first.

Two days of practice were followed by three days of racing to determine qualifiers for the finals. Qualifying teams then moved on to knockout rounds. In total, my team had five days before the knockout series to learn the boat. First, we learned that a 69F can foil in very light conditions. However, picking the right puff to levitate onto the foils—and then pumping hard enough to maintain flight—is a hard move to time right, and it’s even harder to maintain flight. Trimmer and flight controller both have to constantly roll and press to maintain speed (class rules permit this) and the three of us switched positions frequently for the sake of recovery. We didn’t get much time on-foil before racing began.

I’m at home in the strong winds of San Francisco Bay, so when a squall suddenly brought the wind to 18 knots at the first start of the first day of competition, I was excited. We were on a reaching start to a quadrilateral course in a boat capable of 30 knots and I had about 30 minutes of solid foiling under my belt. What could possibly go wrong? Well …

First, we narrowly averted a collision with a boat capsized to leeward. Then came a gust we weren’t ready for and the discovery that going from 25 knots to zero is an abrupt change. Our flight controller, Ella, performed her next two maneuvers to perfection. First, she went flying out of the boat. Then she popped back aboard, declared “I’m good!” and we were back in the race.

Considerably older and wiser after three days of knockout rounds, we found ourselves in fourth place, qualified to continue to the finals. A win late in the day placed us in second but—and it was a big but.

On the last day, the breeze lightened again. We remained competitive but struggled in the starts.  We made a few mistakes in maneuvers, and our inadequate batten tension was really “messed up” in the words of our friends from the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron. That said, the day had its triumphs: We clocked the fastest daily speed at 26 knots, improved our coordination during tacks and completed a foiling jibe. We had arrived in Miami with a plan to learn as much as we could about the 69F and how to race it, with a goal of setting ourselves up for Act 3 in Newport, Rhode Island, this July. We came away knowing we had exceeded our expectations.

The post Flight School(ed) In the Persico 69F appeared first on Sailing World.

While the AC75s of the 36th America’s Cup remain shrink-wrapped and idle while the Challenger of Record and Defender draft their protocol, the engineers and designers at Italy’s Persico Marine have been advancing their own Cup afterparty in the form of a 40-foot version of the flying beasts of Auckland, and in late July announced plans to push ahead with a production run of what will be called the Persico Fly40 One Design.

“Persico Marine has thus opened a new market segment targeted at owners, for whom the ‘new normal’ will be a foiler with canting arms – a high-performance, one-design-class monohull conceived for an upwind start, tacking duels and every aspect of the traditional regatta, but at three times the windspeed,” the builder states in its announcement in early August.

The Persico Fly40 is conceived as a 38-foot, 3,527-pound foiling vessel with a designed takeoff in 7 knots of true windspeed. Designed for a crew of 5, Persico says, “the Fly40 can be trailered and moved easily.”

“In the last five months we have dedicated ourselves to achieving an impressive goal: transferring our research and development of the 36th America’s Cup to the market,” says Marcello Persico, president Persico Marine. “In an instant, on the day we saw our AC75s sail for the first time, all our previous accomplishments up to that moment became ‘the past.’ Following the revolutionary innovations of the last edition of the America’s Cup and thanks to the performance of the AC75, a visionary and radical foiling craft, we are witnessing a real change in paradigm: the time is right to raise the regatta field to a new dimension that will allow everyone to experience fly-foiling.”

Structural engineering is provided by Pure Design & Engineering from New Zealand, which also worked with Emirates Team New Zealand; naval architecture and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is led by Caponnetto Hueber, a collaborator with Luna Rossa, the 36th America’s Cup Challenger of Record. To help lead the project, they’ve also tapped Luna Rossa co-helmsman Francesco Bruni.

“By presenting an advanced 40-foot foiler today, we are in a position to play a central role in revolutionizing the market,” Bruni says. “I am sure this project will have great success and am very happy to be part of it. This is a promising moment for the sailing world.”

As with the Persico 69F circuit currently underway, Persico says the Fly40 One Design class will feature an owner-driver styled circuit with Persico providing support and services.

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“The first partner announcement came through Rhode Island’s East Bay Sailing Foundation which operates on the grounds of Bristol YC where, in late July, U.S. SailGP team members will kick off the initiative on the upper reaches of Narragansett Bay with its first foiling camp for local kids and coaches. “Since launching Foiling First we’ve been overwhelmed by the response from the American sailing community,” said U.S. SailGP Team CEO and Driver Jimmy Spithill in a team statement. “We’re looking forward to working with Bristol Yacht Club and East Bay Sailing Foundation and we’re excited to invite more organizations to join. It’s really encouraging to see communities ready to participate in change on and off the water.”

The program, the team says, has three components whereby organizations such as the East Bay Sailing Foundation will build a fleet of foiling boats to train locals with the support of U.S. SailGP Team sailors and coaches who will lead annual multi-day clinics. The partner organization will also then incorporate one diversity-focused organization in their community to work with, supported by Foiling First, to create introductions to the sport of sailing.

“Kids want to learn how to race foiling boats and compete like the pros do,” said Kristin Browne, board chair of the East Bay Sailing Foundation. “At the same time, as a club, we want to contribute to making our sport more inclusive and we’re excited to partner with Foiling First and the U.S. SailGP Team to help begin that change.”

The Foundation will host the first domestic Foiling First: Learn to Foil Camp July 20-21, in cooperation with Melges Performance Sailboats, which will supply six to eight of its Skeeta and Nikka singlehanded scow-like foilers designed by Australian designers Jim and David French. According to Browne, U.S. SailGP sailors Jimmy Spithill, Rome Kirby and Andrew Campbell will lead the clinic next month using boats provided by Melges. For 2022, a patron of the East Bay Sailing Foundation has purchased six boats for the Bristol program.

According to the announcement, Foiling First participants and coaches will also engage in educational workshops with RISE and World Sailing Trust, aimed at educating athletes on racism, social justice, and advancing inclusion in the sport. Interested candidates for the Foil First camp should contact programdirector@eastbaysailingfoundation.org

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Anyone who has taken to a singlehanded foiling craft along the likes of a Moth or Waszp knows full well the exhilaration of liftoff, the silence of flight, and the breathtaking enjoyment of soaring over the surface and whipping through turns. There’s nothing quite like it, and foiling is here and now. As advancements in foiling and composite construction have continued apace, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a with a slick new twist. That twist is the Vortex Pod Racer, which McConaghy Boats’ director Mark Evans describes as a “half boat, half flying machine that flies above the water at speeds of 30 knots.”

Thirty knots is plenty fast for the average sailor, but this craft is not necessarily for the average sailor, Evans says—not at the outset at least. “I think the learning curve is relatively small,” Evan says. “Of course, it’s a new skillset. I put it down to a little bit like learning drums for your first lesson.

“When you first sail the prototype, your brain tells you to steer the Vortex with the joystick, but within 30 minutes, you are steering with your feet and flying with the joystick.” The other comparison he can draw is jumping out of your family wagon and into a Porsche or any other high-performance car. “Ninety percent of people could drive a Porsche, but where you will take time to do it well is at high speed, and therein lies the fun,” Evans says. “I see this as the sports car on the water.”

And how do we get to a 17-foot, 330-pound sports car on water? That’s easy. In Zhuhai, China, McConaghy’s composite wizards craft carbon fiber and pre-preg foam core to make the pod, wings, torsional beams and wing fairings. They’ve built more than 3,000 foiling Moths, so they certainly know what they’re doing with their materials and autoclave. When it comes to the systems to make it fly, these too have been exhaustively vetted through the prototype phase. The waterfall of controls lines into the cockpit is a necessity.

“There is always positive and negative in any design, and from a simple concept, we try to keep the complexity out of the build,” Evans says, “but we have to introduce some complexity to enable the pilot to fly. With ease of sailing in mind, and with the loads that this Vortex can generate, we had to add certain mechanical systems that give the Vortex the ability to fly itself.”

The pilot, he says, simply trims all the foils through the joystick and steers with the foot pedals. Iceboaters will know the foot-pedal drill and, in fact, it was hard-water sailing that spurred Evans to launch the Vortex. “The inspiration was from watching the intense speeds achieved by iceboats,” he says, “where a simple pod and a mainsail are balanced by two outriggers. Speeds achieved by these contraptions can easily top 40 knots in 10 knots of breeze.”

Racing sailors will agree that ripping around at top speed is plenty cool and fun but, eventually, there will come a time when you need to reality-check your skills and line up with others. The next thing you know, you will want to fleet-race.

“My vision and goal would be to see 50 class boats on a starting line,” Evans says. “At low speeds, the Vortex would be flying at 12-plus knots, and seeing this amount of boats maneuvering at high speeds would be spectacular. In my mind, it would be just as fun or more fun [than] racing your Porsche on a track day.”

There’s an optional $4,000 electronics package developed with McConaghy’s partners at Sailmon, but Evans says they’re not necessary to sail the boat. “It’s simply a sailing aid, giving the pilot normal feedback, like wind direction, true wind speed, heel and more, but it’s no way to link any of the control systems to fly the boat.”

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Nicolas Henard, president of the French Sailing Federation, was charged by the Paris 2024 committee to be bold and brave in his promotion of new Olympic sailing events. Like the dramatic gold-medal design of Marianne—the female symbol of the French Republic blended into the Olympic flame—the slate of events Henard and his colleagues at World Sailing voted in for 2024 is bold indeed. Nearly half of the sailing events will showcase hydrofoils. I witnessed that 2018 vote, and there were many arguments for and against moving so swiftly toward the future of foiling in the Olympics, but the door was thrust wide open, accelerating the inevitable evolution in high-performance sailing we are experiencing today.

Predictions that “everything will have foils” in the future, however, have yet to materialize. What’s missing? Big boats. Yes, the Ocean Race now has foiling IMOCA 60s, as does the Vendée Globe. Mini Transat designs are flying. The ­75-footers of the America’s Cup are developing by the day. But no one has been daring enough to build a big monohull sailboat with foils, save for a few of the horizontal DSS foil systems.

The benefits to either fully flying or foil-assisted sailing are known: more righting moment, higher speeds, less heel angle, maybe a more comfortable ride. But the prohibitive barriers are also known: Rating rules are not ready to interpret the dramatic speed deltas between foiling and displacement modes; large foilers would be far more expensive for their size and scale than a similar-size displacement monohull; and without any larger monohull foilers, foil-assisted cruising boats, ocean racers or superyachts on the market, few owners with the financial wherewithal have been willing to take the leap and be first.

Luckily, all the latent interest in foiling is finally showing up in big monohull projects. And who are the brave designers feeding this interest? The venerable Frers family is in the mix, and there are a few others behind closed doors who are secretly poised to turn renderings into realities. But is the rest of the sailing world going to follow these designers into the future? Will foils become a regular fixture at race weeks and offshore races, just as foiling dinghies and boards are now globally prolific?

“We’re applying foils to the casual sailor to achieve the same speeds as a motorboat,” says Mani Frers, the third-­generation yacht designer whose father, German, drew some of the most iconic racing and cruising boats of the past 40 years. “Clients are asking for speed, not necessarily foiling.”

Frers hasn’t seen his first foiling concept come to ­fruition—yet. But he’s getting close. His response to the application of hydrofoils has been predictably intense and unique, altogether avoiding the tantalizing desire to make a large yacht fly above the water. “One of the issues with foiling as a new thing is that no one applies science,” he says. “There are a lot of good things and a lot of BS. I apply foil technology to the whole package.”

Frers, whose son, German Frers VI, is fully involved in their Milan design house, is in the closing stages of two foiling designs: a 60-foot daysailer and a superyacht. He concedes that using foil assist to achieve higher speeds and a stable ride isn’t sexy compared with flying. But the end result of a steady 20 to 25 knots of boatspeed in 12 to 15 knots of wind is attractive.

“We want to bring these boats up to 20 knots and have them just sit there,” Frers says. “Then we start to depower. We use only two sails. It’s like free-ride windsurfing. People don’t want to wear helmets.”

Frers won’t yet reveal the designs he is running through the same simulators used by America’s Cup teams. Why can’t he describe the application of the hydrofoil? Is it sticking out the bottom? The side? Are there two, four or one? He can’t share what’s up his sleeve because it’s early days, and his clients don’t want to see their innovations appearing on other boats before theirs is created.

Regardless of the foil configurations, Frers says his superyacht design is fast enough to generate its own energy—an ancillary benefit of the foils. A hybrid propulsion system “harvests energy while sailing,” he says. “The big-boat foils kick in at 10 knots true windspeed. When under sail, it generates its own power. Foils create more energy. That technology is helping us create a new generation of yachts.”

Frers is blissfully free of ­rating-rule constraints with these two designs. But it is still surprising that rating rules—or the fear of not rating well if the owner does decide to race— is still driving demand for monohull designs. This is one reason why there aren’t any foilers being built and sailed by the average big-boat owner in major ocean races. But there are quite a few new foilers ­further down the size range.

Designers Laureano Marquinez and Nahuel Wilson, for example, were tired of waiting for a client to commission a fully foiling big boat, so they designed one themselves. With interest from clients in South America, New Zealand and Italy, the Argentinians tackled a 40-foot ocean-racing foiler called the MW40OF. The boat is lightweight, with large circular daggerboards similar to those of Alex Thomson’s IMOCA 60 Hugo Boss, as well as twin T-foil retractable rudders. It sure looks like the future of ocean racing, especially for amateur ocean-racing sailors who don’t mind spending their off watch bouncing around in their bunk with one eye open.

“We wanted to bring a fully foiling boat as simple and manageable as we could think of,” says Marquinez, who designed the midrange foiling Persico 69F that’s being used for the Liberty Bitcoin Youth Foiling World Cup. The MW40OF is currently a “very well-advanced preliminary ­project,” he says.

The MW40OF is expected to double the speed of a modern custom 40-foot displacement monohull. “If the boat is not fully foiling,” Wilson says, “the VMG is a little better, lower and faster.” He adds that the boat can find modes upwind to fully foil but that skimming at a wider angle is more likely the faster technique.

Yes, this is going to be a super-slippery boat. Even the renderings show No. 40 ripping through a gray, windswept sea and a menacing sky reminiscent of a Fastnet Race, foretelling its potential. Wilson says this is a movement in ocean sailing that can open doors for younger sailors with high-performance foiling skills. Steering, and even standing, on a 40-footer flying at 25 to 30 knots would be an acquired skill, and young foilers have that in spades, along with the ability to steer precisely when things are coming at them fast.

Before we see these influences, however, there first has to be a boat. To make a dent in the ocean-racing fleet, the boat must have a competitive rating. Being the first to tackle this design equation in the common size of big boats means taking the rating rules themselves head-on.

“This is a very early step in rating these boats,” Marquinez says. “In some senses, once you’re flying, the drag and forces of the appendages are easier to predict. But the ­transition is tricky.”

For Frers, the value proposition of foils is simple: They add speed and comfort. The attractiveness of the MW40OF is something more complicated. “It’s a new experience,” Wilson says. He draws his inspiration for the design from his Persico 69F, which sails with similar appendages and has a daggerboard instead of a keel. “A new program like this will bring a new dimension to club teams. Speed is really addictive.”

Speed is one thing. Foilers have that. But for the vast majority of ocean sailors, crews and owners, boatspeed is just one part of the equation. A lot has to fall in place for foiling to gain acceptance at traditional keelboat regattas, and through their designs, Frers, Marquinez, Wilson and others have a lot of questions to answer. If not bullish at the moment, they are incredibly upbeat.

“We hope to see more foilers, but it’s not super-easy to put one of these together,” Marquinez says. “It’s natural to see where performance sailing goes, but we don’t know where it ends. We do know that these steps we are taking now must be taken.”

Let’s not fool ourselves. The success of foiling big boats has everything to do with those who write the checks. And compromise in design will show the benefits of foils as a contributing solution rather than the main event. Not sexy, but better.

“The future depends on the client,” young German Frers says. “There’s not one route. The newer generation likes foiling, and others don’t think it’s real sailing. This type of foiling is letting more conservative people like foiling. It’s merging two concepts into one.”

The post Big Boats Will Fly appeared first on Sailing World.

Hull design has always been the most venerated aspect of an America’s Cup yacht. The name on the drawings has often been remembered with the same reverence as that of the skipper. This might not hold for much longer because the result of the 36th America’s Cup is just as likely to be determined by the work of a systems engineer as by a naval architect.

“The hull design is one aspect of many, but it’s not the ­dominant aspect,” explains Martin Fischer, co-design coordinator (along with Horacio Carabelli) for the Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli Team, who is on his second America’s Cup with the Italian team. “It’s not as it was with the 12 Metre or with version five (of the International America’s Cup Class), where the hull is really almost everything.”

The rules controlling a class are always a good place to start when seeking to understand a race boat because they drive so much of the design; working for the Challenger of Record, Fischer was part of the team that wrote the class rule for the AC75 with the defenders, Emirates Team New Zealand.

In the case of the AC75, the rules, Fischer says, are actually very open. They have little to say on the structure, for instance, requiring only a “minimum areal density of any part of the hull shell” (2 kg/m²). There’s also a limit on the internal volume (at least 70 m³), and after that, much of what’s left deals with details such as water retention, fairing flaps and penetrations.

There are only a few rules that drive the hull shape and its potential performance. “There is the length,” Fischer says. “The overall length is limited to 20.6 meters (minimum, without the bowsprit), while the beam must be 5 meters. Then there are two other very important rules: There is a theoretical capsize test that is done virtually on the computer. If the boat is turned by 90 degrees, the center of buoyancy must be at a certain position.

“This rule has a strong influence on the deck shapes. You might have noticed that all the boats have relatively high freeboard; this is partly for aerodynamics, but also, if you don’t have relatively high freeboard, you don’t pass this capsize test. The next important rule is that there is a minimum requirement for the waterplane inertia.”

Er…the water what?

“If the hull is floating, then you look at the intersection of the hull with the water surface (waterplane), and that gives the surface a certain shape. And then compute the inertia of that shape (it must be at least 20 m4). It’s not important to understand exactly what it is; in the end, it is more or less a measure or a constraint on the ­combination of that surface and its width.”

I’m not going to try to explain the ­calculation of the “second moment of area”—the important thing, according to Fischer, is that you “basically cannot make an extremely narrow hull, so you have to respect a certain area for that surface, and a certain width. The rule on the inertia is also quite type-forming; it imposes widths at the waterline. Of course, we all would like [the hull] to go narrow. Especially when the boat starts going fast, just before takeoff, we all want a narrow hull. And this is why we have these humps ­underneath the hull.”

Ah yes, the humps, skegs or bustles are one of the most significant shared ­features on all four of the newly launched, second-generation AC75s. The terms refer to the narrow, protruding section that runs down the centerline underwater. In the first-generation boats, only the Kiwi and Italian boats had this feature, and it was most ­pronounced on the latter.

“It’s a trick not to get around this inertia rule but to deal with it,” Fischer explains. “What you do is design a hull wide enough to pass this inertia rule while it is at the design flotation. And then as soon as it gets a bit of speed, the foil starts pushing up, and so the boat comes up, and then this wide part of the hull gets out of the water and only the narrow part remains. This significantly reduces the drag, especially during the takeoff phase.”

The humps also help when the boat touches down. “And that’s another reason for these humps underneath, because they allow you to fly lower, to take more risk, because if you touch a wave, the wetted surface, or the area that touches the wave, is very small, and therefore it slows you down only very little.”

Benjamin Muyl is on his second Cup with Ben Ainslie’s British challenger, having been involved in the event since 2005. Now the architect, he sums up the factors driving the performance of the AC75: “As soon as we decided that these boats are only going to race in flying (foiling) conditions, then there’s no point in having any righting moment from the hull. The whole righting moment comes from the foil, so then the hull shape is all about takeoff capabilities, so effectively [acceleration and performance at] slowish speed, in the order of 16 to 20 knots—the touchdowns. So, the ability of the hull to develop little drag when touching the water at speed or out of tacks, or out of jibe. And the other part of it, which is actually very important for these boats, is the aerial performance of the hull.”

This is the reason all four boats have skegs; they provide a benefit in all three areas that Muyl and Fischer describe. They enable better acceleration at slower speeds, and reduce the hydrodynamic drag and deceleration on touchdowns. This allows the boat to fly closer to the water, which has another important aerodynamic contribution. “On every wing, you have a high-­pressure side and a low-pressure side,” Fischer explains. “And obviously, the air tries to flow from the high-pressure side to the low-­pressure side, and if you let it do that, you lose lift. On a normal sailboat, this circulation that makes you lose lift is at the bottom, underneath the boom, and this loss is quite significant. To avoid that, on all the [AC75] boats, we see deck sweeper sails.”

Muyl worked with both Fischer and ETNZ’s Guillaume Verdier on Franck Cammas’ Groupama 5, the International C-Class Catamaran Championship winner. It should be no surprise, therefore, that their thinking is aligned here. “In recent years, we’ve seen sails and wings extend to seal to the deck. It pretty much started with the Groupama C-Class boat for Cammas. And then that was also seen on the AC72, and since then all the Cup boats have the mainsail sealing on the deck. On these boats (the AC75), for the first time we have a monohull that’s flying. So, what’s happening is that now there is a gap again, so we pushed to effectively seal the hull to the water.”

It’s impossible to completely seal the hull to the water without increasing the hydrodynamic drag, and even maintaining the minimum distance is made harder by waves. “So, even if you had perfect control of the boat, it would be impossible to close that gap completely. But [the teams] make big efforts to close that gap as much as ­possible,” Fischer says.

“We spotted [the performance effect of sealing the gap] early in the project,” Muyl adds, “and always questioned whether it was a true phenomenon, or whether it was an artifact of the computation. We finally made the call to go there to try to achieve it. It’s interesting to see that all the boats have gone there now. So, yes, we followed the same path. It was done with different means between the various teams, but we went for this very squared bustle to try to create a vortex off the sharp edge that would effectively seal [the gap].”

When we look at the four new boats, it’s clear there is significant agreement on what makes for a fast AC75. The skegs are the most obvious element, but an aerodynamic hull shape is a close second. The speed of the boats drives this one, with apparent winds that can easily exceed 40 mph.

“If you stick your hand out of a car when you’re driving at that speed, you feel how big this drag is,” Fischer says. “This drag component is comparable to the drag we see in the water. All the teams have paid enormous attention to this; they hide the crew as much as they can, and have the shape of the hull as aerodynamic as possible, to reduce drag as much as possible.”

If looked at sideways from the beam, all the second-generation hulls reveal an aero foil section from bow to stern—don’t be fooled by the high sides of the Kiwi’s crew pods. Fischer explains: “It is hidden because [ETNZ has] these relatively high cockpits on the side to cover the crew. But in between the cockpits, the shape is pretty much like an aero foil. The American boat also has a pretty nice aero foil shape, and as well, the British boat. I think the only main difference is that on our boat, it’s a bit more obvious, but the others have more or less the same idea.”

The third consistent element is the split cockpit. “The cockpits were pretty much the same everywhere at the beginning,” Fischer says. “All the teams have cockpits on each side, with the crew well-protected from the wind to reduce drag. Also, the Americans at the beginning had the cockpit very far aft. Now they are farther forward. So overall, I think we can see quite a bit of convergence, but there’s still a wide variety.”

The variety in the boats is driven by the details, and they will decide the winner. For instance, there are significant differences in the skegs, which shouldn’t be a surprise given there are three different motives for having the skeg in the first place. “The optimal shape for these purposes is different,” Fischer says. “If you focus on ­aerodynamics, then you want a pretty narrow hump, because if you touch down, the wetted surface is really small, and so you can fly lower. The penalty you pay, if you touch a wave, is less than with a wider hump. But with a narrow hump, you have difficulties in takeoff because the volume in such a narrow hump is very small, and you need a lot more lift from the foil to get the flat part—the wide part of the hull—out of the water.”

The choices the teams have made reflect the capabilities they have prioritized for the upcoming racing. “The Kiwis and the British have a wider hump underneath, which is pretty flat at the bottom,” Fischer says. “So, in my opinion, they try to generate positive lift when they touch, and probably also during takeoff. Of course, if you generate lift when you touch, that comes at a price —you also generate drag.”

Muyl agrees, adding: “[It’s] not forgiving if we touch because there’s quite a lot of wetted surface area to start with. So, effectively, we are relying quite a lot on the ability of the sailors to control the boat and to fly it just above the free surface.”

“American Magic has a very narrow hump,” Fisher says. “So, in my opinion, they’re focused more on aerodynamics and flying low than on takeoff.”

Or maybe they want the best of both worlds. Muyl points to a different takeoff technique. “Their strategy to takeoff is to accelerate as well as they can, but then, when they are at the speed to takeoff, somewhere between 16 and 19 [knots], they force the nose up with their rudder, and effectively increase the angle of attack on the foil and takeoff like that.”

American Magic’s designer, Marcelino Botin, wasn’t giving much away at this stage. Speaking at the launch of Patriot, he said: “We’ve got a philosophy of the boat that we need, and the boat we have produced is our interpretation of the best possible boat to take forward that way of thinking.”

And the Italians? “Our hump is more rounded, and I would say ours is somewhere in between what the Americans did, and what the British and Team New Zealand did,” Fischer says. “So that’s a choice. When you design the yacht, you have to make ­assumptions and define conditions for which you want to optimize your shape.”

The winning design will need both the most accurate set of assumptions about the competing priorities, and efficient optimization. Easy to say, but there is nothing straightforward about this process, as Muyl explains: “I find this boat really complex, in terms of how everything is so interlinked. If you look at just the foils, we have [in the fleet] some very large bulbs and some very small bulbs—the whole scope. So, that’s interesting that four teams of competent people with comparable tools, with comparable budget and time, effectively reached some very different solutions in the end. I personally found it very hard to have a feeling for what’s the direction to go to be faster. The whole thing is incredibly intertwined. I find it very complex. And that’s at every level of the design.”

Fischer agrees, adding: “This kind of hull was new for everybody, and basically, everybody had to start from scratch and find new ways. And I can say, I don’t know what the others did, but we went for a very mathematical approach to get there. We used, right from the beginning, a dynamic simulator.

“We used systematic, automatic optimization methods to get to the hull shape that we got in the end. And I think without this mathematical approach, it would have been very, very difficult. And I guess for the other teams, it’s the same. I think it is very difficult with these boats to get to a good result with pure intuition.”

Now that they can see where they fit into the fleet, how do they feel?

“Well, I think we don’t really know,” Muyl says. “We have a feel for New Zealand. I mean, they won the last one. They gave a sailing lesson to everyone. So, they are usually strong, but so much is about reliability that I find it really hard to have a sense that I can trust about where things are.”

Fischer was more guardedly optimistic about the Challenger’s chances. “I think as usual, [ETNZ] did a good job, but I don’t think they…well, I hope they won’t be superior, and I don’t think they will be superior. I think it will be pretty tight racing.”

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