Image credit: American Youth Sailing Force


"It's bloody hard to get the credibility for these sort of things. Until a few months ago we still didn't have any credibility because we were still that team that almost did it."


applied. That will be the path we go down next. Speed for speed sake has got no real purpose. We have shown we can do that and we will probably go back down there and go faster with that boat because we are fascinated by the efficiency of the whole thing and turning theory into reality too. But we haven't really maxed the boat out yet, which is really what we are supposed to do with it. We would like to do that for sure, but in parallel with another project which starts to apply this in an offshore environment which makes people start to think, I could play around with that in my shed and maybe make something out of plywood which is as fast as something which is currently made out of carbon.  Just to go bigger and more expensive is actually quite an ugly way to go. If you look at Banque Populaire V, it did an amazing job and it was sailed really well and it set a very high benchmark. But I'm sure there are better ways of doing that sort of stuff.  I think the way you can apply these concepts to offshore boats is going to be the interesting thing. But offshore boats demand a lot of compromise. I don't want to build a boat that can just sail in 25 to 30 knots of wind on a frontal system and do a 24 hour record or something like that - although that would be fun. I want something that can win a round the island race. Something that is quick downwind and upwind and in light winds and strong winds and can look after itself. I'm talking about something which will be an all round better way of doing things.  I try to look at things with an open mind - and also an educated mind now. i look at a lot of sailing boats now and to me they just look wrong. But we have accepted that that is how it is done. So I think we have got to go and start looking at that compromise and how we do things. A boat that you make for racing around windward leeward courses will be different to one that you want to sail across open oceans or around the world. We have to find that balance and I think that there will be boats that we will be playing around with that look nothing like what is out there now. If they can only be just a little bit better then that wouldn't interest me but hopefully they will represent a significant gain.  It's bloody hard to get the credibility for these sort of things - it's taken us a long time to get to this level of credibility after all. Until a few months ago we still didn't have any credibility because we were still that team that almost did it. You have to go out and prove you can do it.  We won't shoot for the stars straight away, we will try to do things in bite size chunks first of all, where it has to be obvious to us and the media and the public and therefore the sponsors to be able to say, well that makes sense, what next?  Right now we are at the stage where we are looking at these concepts and starting to whittle them down - just in the same way as we did with the second Sailrocket. First it was just a bunch of ideas and then we ended up with this hybrid boat incorporating some of them and that's the boat we ended up sending down the course.  So now we are looking at the concept of boats that are automatically stable and not fighting themselves all the time and are a lot cleaner, a lot more aerodynamic and more efficient in terms of hydrodynamics. We will look at all the options and then start building test scale models about a


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