Gitana 18: the new flying Ultim trimaran
boatnews.comAmazing. I saw the introduction of 'high tech fabrics' into sails up close when I was working with/for TD Sails in the Netherlands. The owner was - besides a very nice guy - into materials technology and math and the combination was quite interesting. He was also a visionary, spending a lot of money on CAD when everybody else was still laying out sails by hand and attempting to automate the fabric cutting stage. This was just when water jets were becoming feasible but I don't think he ever managed to get their cutting table to work.
Theo Dokman more or less predicted that the sailing industry and the aircraft industry would converge in terms of high tech while the customers were still asking for 1880's style 'brown' cloth sails for the traditional Dutch fleet.
He would have been super happy to see this, this (and some predecessors) validates pretty much everything he talked about. I'm absolutely amazed at the specs of this vessel, if you take into consideration the length of the hull and the speeds it can attain and in what kind of sea states it is able to do so. The difference between 'theoretically possible' and 'let's build it' here is so large that I wonder what the total bill for putting this out there was.
Note that it hasn't gone hydroplaning yet (apparently the surfaces are not yet fitted), but they're slowly working up to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjiGtwd8q4Q
around ~1 minute the interesting bits start.
> while the customers were still asking for 1880's style 'brown' cloth sails for the traditional Dutch fleet
That is missing the point a bit. For quite a lot of fleets, keeping the tradition alive is a very important aspect of sailing/racing said boats. The other aspect is that for these "one design" classes, the rules, including what the material of the sail is, are meant to keep the old boats competitive and, probably the most important aspect, not end up with pay-to-win situations.
No, you are missing the point a bit: the brown fleet was what brought in the bulk of the bacon, but meanwhile everybody working at TD was far more interested in the future of sailing than the past (case in point: Maurice Paardekooper's experimental kevlar sails for his laser class boat), but the high tech future of sailing was - and still is - a complete money pit without much in terms of practical applications. Of course they made also lots of conventional sails, spinnakers, mainsails and so on for regular sailing vessels, but that was cut-throat and there were many providers of such sails.
The brown fleet was a money pit as well but for the providers of the sails (I believe these days mostly Gaastra but possibly others, Gaastra was going more and more in the direction of sports goods) it was still a money maker.
The key here is that Dokman was amazingly knowledgeable through his long term interaction with the people running the brown fleet vessels, who - as you pointed out - also love to have an edge in their races and TD sails were amongst the best there were at the time: absolutely legal with respect to techniques and materials used but meanwhile engineered with the best software that we could lay our hands on or build ourselves.
So you could be a recreational or for-hire vessel on most days and a potential race winner if you decided to enter a contest, and they looked spectacularly clean. That gave us the best of both worlds, a step-up into high tech while still mostly using traditional materials and techniques.
Edit: Theo died a while ago and I still see TD sails every now and then and it always reminds me of a great time. I didn't have a house back then (housing shortage in NL is not something recent) and slept above the sailmakery :)
Here are some in their natural environment:
https://primary.jwwb.nl/public/p/r/h/temp-wqhdccofnxpbaxjxoo...
(not the traditional 'sword' visible on the side, a large wooden structure on a hinge that could be lowered for stability, these vessels are extremely shallow because they're made for inland waters and shallow 'Waddenzee', the typical draft is less than a meter).
More of the same vessel:
not -> note
I grew up watching racing thanks to my grandad's interest but all with all the tech involved in these high end machines it's like watching jetplanes or something mechanical, maybe it's because I can't connect anymore to what's happening on a human level. I love the thrill of a fast boat but it's lost me on the accessibility that I remember from the 80s and 90s. I remember how crews and captains would be celebrities, now it seems it's a tech game?
Edit: it's a beautiful machine, regardless. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ruh3hASFyGw
Basically every contest tends to lose interest, for me, either as a spectator or participant, the more “refined” the play. From board games to sports.
I’d love to be able to go back and watch some of the goofy stuff that went on in, say, early baseball, among the best players of the time. And the slower play, et cetera.
I’d take up golf if the equipment and course sizes were more like they were in the early 20th century. (Yes, there are organizations and a handful of courses that support this, but they’re rare enough not to be something a person can really do unless they live close to the right place, are comfortably retired, or are the idle rich). Ultra-engineered balls and clubs so you can hit the ball farther than you can even see… what? Why? How is that improving the game?
The underlying dynamic is always the same: competition kills the game / fun ...
The golf one’s especially weird to me. The overall effect of the fancy gear is that courses doubled in acreage and… you hit the ball over most of that new land on your first stroke anyway (at least, that’s the idea, lol). Like, the advantage is gone as soon as courses adjust, and you’re back to about the same thing, just way bigger (and all-around more expensive). It almost seems like we’d have been better off if ultra-long-range targeted drives had become a separate sport, and golf stayed smaller with “bad” clubs.
There's also Moth-class sailing or windfoiling for mere mortals.
Have you watched sail gp or the recent America's cups. The racing is as incredibly exciting to watch and the skills of the sailors is a huge part of it. I'd argue that technology was always a huge part of sailing, but compare that to many of the "old" America's cups and now you'll see the racing is so much more exciting (largely because while technology is at the forefront, the rules make boats technologically advanced, but also comparable enough to each other).
I'd also argue that sailors (and particularly skippers) are still celebrities (within the sailing community). Now where you're right, is that that these boats are not accessible to the average sailors anymore, but it is because they require so much skill to sail.
> Now where you're right, is that that these boats are not accessible to the average sailors anymore, but it is because they require so much skill to sail.
I'd argue the money is a much larger factor than it was in the past, but in the past it was quite expensive as well.
They claim simulations estimate ability to stay aloft at 30 knots in 3 meter waves. WOWWWW. My stomach churns for multiple reasons imagining that, and the pitchpole flip at the end. Urgh.
Spoken like someone that's been on a boat :) Interestingly, the only time I got really seasick was on a giant ferry...
Always wondered - Are the foil things not a danger to wildlife (and well the boat I guess if the hit is sizable)
There is indeed something beautiful about traditional boats but this is a different kind of beauty. And 40 knots in 3 metre waves? Wow! Like F1 cars don't drive like road cars the automated control means this is not a boat but something else wonderous.
Yes, that is a most impressive stat, if they can achieve it.
I’m not sure it’s mentioned anywhere here, but it’s likely that this boat will set the world’s record for speed around the globe — if it circumnavigates, and it is hard to imagine it won’t.
I’m not sure why, but I find that fascinating. No other boat, motor or nuclear reactor, can go around the world as fast as a modern sailboat.
I guess the situation with boats is the same as with land speed records? In the limit, the fastest boat simply becomes an airplane just touching the water.
Indeed. The really interesting bit is that the power required is high enough that the wind can be used to cover distances far greater than a fuel tank. And, given their weight nuclear reactors don’t fly (as much as due to the kind of ships they’re in, granted).
So instead of a keel/weight it uses downforce? That would be neat
I love me some hulls out of the water but I have a quibble with the term “flying” when there’s still something in the water and taking everything out of the water is dangerous, even of it is only a tiny fraction of the boat… have hydrofoils always been spoken of as flying or is that more recent hype?
They call it flying because foils are flying through a medium, generating lift, just as the wings of airplanes do.
A big difference is that these wings lift the main body out of that medium (water) into a much less dense one (air), hugely decreasing resistance.
And yes, this doesn’t lift the boat completely out of the water, but airplanes do not get completely out of the medium they use (air), either.
Interesting point about not moving out of the medium. I don’t think this is terribly important but you could say that the airplane completely moves from the medium of wheels on the ground into the less dense medium of air.
The important distinction is that you can not fly in anything that doesn't get out of the way as you move through it.
So the 'wheels on the ground' don't have anything to do with flight (though technically they are also in the air). Flight takes place in a medium. For a plane that is only one medium unless you're looking at a flying boat at take-off, for a sailing vessel there are two, there is the water (dense, slow to push out of the way so high drag) and the air (much less dense, so faster to push out of the way, much lower drag).
In the context of a planing catamaran, flying refers to allowing the windward hull to lift out of the water in order to minimize wetted surface area. These boats, especially the Hobie 16, were quite popular in the 70s and 80s.
Ha ha, we were taught to keep our optimist bathtubs halfway out of the water when sailing downwind back then. I mostly joke but no one called that flying :).
in those wonderful little square boats the reason for tipping the hull was to reduce the amount of weight it surface and dragged through the water. It was still floating, being held above the bottom by buoyancy,so definitely not flying.
Hmmm... apologies for the music.
yes, yes. I have seen that abomination. Not class legal. lol
it’s been “flying” as long as I can remember. It’s the distinction between that and floating.
A traditional boat relies on buoyancy to keep it away from the murky depths, while these boats rely on buoyancy only when at rest or going slowly. After that, once the foils take over, they are genuinely flying in that no buoyancy is involved.
But then again, does the word really matter? People refer to “flying” in hot air balloons, too.
Does the tech advancing yacht racing transfer to industrial or social uses?
Foils are starting to appear in production boats
Candela ships both ferries and leisure boats with foils (though propelled by electricity rather than sails).
They've been in use for decades.
I wouldn’t call a Moth (a high performance racing dinghy) a production boat, a boat for recreational use, cruising, or general sailing.
But that‘s just me perhaps.
I don't know why you dragged those things in but (1) it is a production boat (2) it is for recreational use.
As for cruising and general sailing: neither are any of the other hydrofoils, their main purpose is racing and performance sailing.
At some point it's more a "weird shaped airplane flies close to the water" than a sailing boat. It sure does look super cool tho.
They also need very detailed regulations to stop F1 being "wired shaped airplane flies close to tarmac"
Well, it's not an Ekranoplan (AKA Ground-effect vehicle)
> 50k hours of design, 200k hours and 100 people to build
Wow, this is an enormous amount of wealth and human effort spent on a sport that I'm barely aware of. I'm curious about the economics of it; is there enough of a spectator base to make this profitable, or is it mostly just a few ultra-wealthy patrons?
The French public pays attention to it, as do offshore sailors in general, but it’s a tiny “market” of eyeballs. My Naval architect friends who don’t sail also find it interesting from an engineering perspective and Gitana puts out good content, albeit in French, so I’m using the translator a lot. The programs and races are mostly sponsored by large French banks and dynastically wealthy families, I assume there is some overlap there… It’s like formula 1 but less eyeballs and more French prestige. A vast majority of the skippers and crew of these yachts these days are French, with the occasional Brit thrown in there.
It's an unholy circle jerk of rich people's pet projects and back handed corporate R&D. Don't try and make it make sense. It doesn't. It may be partially self funding through viewership and other but it's still a money fire no matter how you cut it. Think of it like space exploration circa 2005 only funded by rich people and interests rather than by nation states. Every now and then something trickles down into "normal use". Plastic braided rope is a good example.
Thought it said Gintama for a moment. The boat looks pretty neat though.