News Around the World
In 2026 it will be the 10th anniversary of Andrew McDougall’s Waszp launch and in that time clever but restrained development with new swap-in elements have made for a steadily improving platform with little real obsolescence. Ironic indeed that the Waszp first went on sale at a price (circa $10,000) equivalent at the time to a complete set of foiling Moth rig and foils capable of winning a major championship; for the price of a Waszp today you’d be lucky to find anyone willing to sell you much more than a Moth boatcover…
SH: Sailor weight? AM:Weight is not as critical here, because if you are light you will get up earlier, and if you are heavy you will go faster once you are up. In the top end of our performance group you get kids at 60kg and guys at 88kg, and so a 28kg range. They can all win races – and there aren’t many classes that can do that. SH: Fleet size? AM: Last count we are in 46 countries, with I think 1,800 boats. And in terms of costings, in the USA the boat is US$16,000. SH: Is there a type of Waszp philosophy? In your class rules you have ‘no spray lubricants’, to prevent this washing into the ocean… AM: People talk about sustainability, and modern boats, big and small, are built of non-sustainable composites like epoxy and what have you. You have to look at this in a different light; the Waszps, every single one of them that we are aware of, are still in a sailing condition. They are just unbreakable. They have a lot of aluminium, which is recyclable, and a carbon mast – I only know of five that have broken (from a car running over it or a RIB smashing into it). The boom is aluminium. The sail and the wing tramps are probably
the least ecologically friendly things – you can’t really do much with them and, yes, they do wear out. But we have spent so much time making sure this boat is right, meaning that we are not building something that will get tossed into the bin. Guys are still racing boats hard from the first 100 that we built in 2016! So that is my commitment to sustainability. It is not about the lubricant rule – it is about building stuff that will be around for years and still be usable. SH: Many years ago I came down to Melbourne, to view the R&D you were putting in, and one test I will never forget is that you threw a hammer at one of your Waszp hulls – repeatedly! AM: Yep. Kids young and old will ram things and hit stuff, so the structure has really been thought through. And obviously we have huge loads. There is a wing and a mast and no stays, so the only thing that transfers the mast load to the person on the wing is the hull. That whole mast/wing/socket area is critical.
30 SEAHORSE There was one small mistake at the start of production, the way
the wing frame was attached, so 20 of the first boats were altered; since then there have been no mast/socket failures or wing frame failures. When people hit logs floating under the surface at speed, that can create some issues with centrecases, but all the way along we look at everything and try to make it better. Completely the oppo- site of the planned obsolescence thing – that is not how I work. SH: Refinement requests from the sailors over the years… AM: Two key things, which are interesting. One is that the rudder sucked. It did, it says so on our website! The new rudder has trans- formed the boat. We had a lot of feedback of – ‘get us a new rudder’. The other thing is a lot of people asked to get the lift-off earlier; nobody asked us to make the boat go faster. I always knew how the rudder should be, I just didn’t know how to build it! SH: And so… AM: A long process that started five years ago. To me, I only have one shot at these things, so the first thing I did was to put a current set of front and rear Mach 2 foils on it, and that was pretty cool. I got a number of people to try that, then just the front foil, then just the rear foil. The general opinion was they loved the rudder, but not really the front foil, so I focused on the rudder. Then I looked at an older Mach 2 rudder, and it was better still – more forgiving and still fits seamlessly into our rudder box. We floated the idea of carbon – but I was determined to do it with aluminium and plastic. We are a benevolent dictatorship, so that when I come to the
stage of handing over the reins nobody will be able to change it at all. And remember that fun is a huge part of the ethos here. To make a new aluminium foil I needed to commit. And I decided
that I had to learn enough about things, so firstly I took the lower part of a Mach 2 rudder foil, and I put the top part of the Waszp aluminium section on that, and that was better. Now the part in the water was Mach 2 and the part up top was super-stiff – stiffer than the small carbon section. Then I asked what would happen if I find an aluminium lower section from a Wing foiler and splice that onto
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