The best just got better
When championship-winning small boat, offshore yacht and America’s Cup designer Paul Bieker finds he has time on his hands, not infrequently he will create something playful and new... quite often for the foiling Moth class. Great news for a pioneering class that continues to be a hotbed for foil and rig development, not such good news for Bieker’s class rivals
My first exposure to the Moth class was in the mid-1990s when a couple of the older guys in the Seattle International 14 fleet bought me a plane ticket to go to Australia and learn about the skiff scene down under. I had spent much of my teens and 20s trying to learn as much as I could about the Australian skiff classes and now I was going to see them first hand! My primary focus was learning as much
as possible about the Aussie 14ft skiff with the goal of creating an amalgamated rule that would merge the Australian and Inter- national 14ft skiff classes (which we man- aged to do). That said, I was keen to learn as much as I could about the Australian
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high-performance skiff scene in general. My first stop on the trip was to meet Frank Bethwaite. I had been through all of Frank’s books on high-performance sailing multiple times and I was very keen to meet him in person (but bashful). To my amazement Frank took me under
his wing and spent a whole day with me in Sydney – even taking me down to the harbour to rig up and sail what was his current HSB (high speed boat) single - hander. We rigged the boat up at a neat little park/beach on the harbour which lucky for me just happened to be hosting a small Moth regatta at the same time. The Moths had recently made the tran-
sition to what was being called the ‘skiff moth’. These were very narrow hulls with wide hiking racks (like the current Moths). Pocket-luffed mainsails with camber inducers were just showing up on the scene – something else now standard in the class. One of the memorable guys who I met
there was a designer/builder by the name of Mark Thorpe, who was building exquisite skiff Moths and was obviously waste deep in the development of the class. His own beautiful and superlight boat
had sprouted elevators on its rudder to help give dynamic lift and stabilise pitching (this was what led me to my original initial thoughts about putting wings on my own International 14 rudders).
However, I didn’t get the opportunity to
work on Moths until almost 10 years later, but I came out of that Australia trip with an understanding that the smallest skiff class was a serious hotbed of development. For example, within five years of when
I first saw them in action, fully foiling Moths were starting to have success on the racecourse. It is important to realise that it was this little development skiff class that first introduced hydrofoiling to the modern sailing scene. I was not involved in the initial develop-
ment of foiling Moths but I did design a few foils for the US sailor Bora Gulari in the late 2000s when he was deeply involved in the class, going on to twice win the class world championship in 2013 and 2017. Meanwhile, I was learning a lot about
foils with the International 14s that I was designing and building at the time. But my introduction to fully foiling boats was a quick trial by fire in San Francisco with the Oracle AC72 and the 2013 America’s Cup. In the end I was responsible for the structural engineering and construction design of the foils for that boat and we gained a lot of experience in a little under a year of foiling on San Francisco Bay prior to the event! Working on foils in an America’s Cup
campaign is a quick way to learn – every- thing is done on a tight timeframe, people
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