We come in peace
… And with pragmatism in our sights. From their Rhode Island skunkworks Dave and Steve ‘Cogito’ Clark have entered mass market foiling, but there is more to this story than that. Not to mention those aliens...
I was sailing along on my own. A gust hit and my boat began acting strangely; acting lighter. Like it was 20ft long, not 10ft. It shot forward and lifted skyward, singing like a choir of nervous angels as it hurtled through the air going higher and higher. My pulse hammering and breath shorten- ing, I strained my mind to keep up with the now ultra-responsive thunderbolt that my simple catamaran had become. And that’s when I met the aliens. They’re phenomenally cool beings with
eerie fast faces. ‘Dave,’ they said, ‘we foiled across the cosmos to meet your species and bring you the universal enlightenment of flight. Fly more to hang out with us and learn our ways.’ ‘Why me?!!’ I gormlessly spluttered – and promptly sped out of the front of the gust. The boat came down flat, back to merrily planing along as if nothing had changed. But everything had changed. I needed to
54 SEAHORSE
go back up there. That was my first encounter with Probe, a prototype I’d cobbled together from fancy garbage in a 20-day building sprint in the autumn of 2015. My dad and I cooked up the basic concept that June. A small, robust, cheap foiling catamaran that makes flight truly easy and accessible. I did sporadic work on the design end with growing fascination. A month later I fortuitously broke my
ankle loading a container and found myself bedridden with nothing to do but build 3D models and run laminate, cost, buoyancy and power-to-weight spreadsheets. Rotten luck, I thought at first, but not when I started to read the results. Fascination con- verted promptly to obsession as the cascad- ing benefits of the design sweet-spot we’d wandered into showed up on paper. Smaller is lighter, which is faster, has
lower peak loads… so is more durable thus easier and cheaper to make and easier to store. Normal people could realistically own them and fly them which meant com- panies could produce them in volume and serve entire fleets. It would be good busi- ness for the sailmakers so even the cost of the sails would go down. The whole configuration sat in a unique
harmony with all of its objectives and more. Oh my God. It could work. It could actually work. The second I could limp I was building. The second I had it done I was sailing. Ten minutes from launching it
was foiling. Dad shouted out from the chase boat, ‘You did it, you beauty! It works!’ Thirty-four months have blown past
since then and the growth, development and elation have held entirely constant throughout. The potential exposed with Probe has become actual with the produc- tion model, the UFO, which we’ve built 165 of since last April. In short, here’s what it is: take the foils
from a Moth and simplify them. Make the verticals from aluminium but keep the hard working carbon in the lifting foils. You’ll need it. Do the same thing with the rig, refining without unmaking the core technology. For the hull build a light fibre- glass and carbon catamaran. This acts like a pair of training wheels on either side of your midline foil package and in extremely light air turns the boat into a lazy Sunday cruise, rather than a wretched day wobbl - ing about and going nowhere. This has the added upshot of allowing the foils to with- draw up between the hulls, making the boat fully beachable. This pays in spades off a dock and when coming up to beachy islands adventure sailing. Keep everything simple. Keep every-
thing user-friendly, keep everything cheap. Keep everything light, at a total of 50kg rigged, so the boat’s easy to throw on top of a car (I use my Prius and all the parts collapse and go into the back).
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