A trio of ‘accessible foilers’ of different levels of complexity. The F101 (left) evolved into a trimaran but is really a foiling monohull with permanent training floats; the larger platform allows a big enough rig for the boat to work with a very wide range of crew weight from around 60 to 150kg. The Skeeter (top right) is based on the Moth scows of the 1970s, is hugely more forgiving to fly than a foiling Moth and sails very well in displacement mode. Similarly the UFO – which in displacement mode really can be enjoyed by a novice
To be honest it’s initially terrifying how
quickly it goes from treating you like a fragile child to treating you like a fighter pilot trying to break the sound barrier. I’m certain all the UFO sailing I’ve done has permanently restructured my brain. That luxury-to-insanity gradient is unique to the UFO in all of production boatbuilding. Usually when you build a quad-foiler
catamaran it goes from stable on the water to stable a few feet further up in the air. To be entirely frank I’ve always found that boring. When you build a Moth-based monohull you usually go from tippy and challenging to foiling and challenging. The UFO is the only boat I’ve ever sailed or seen that transitions from a river toy I can give my niece beginner sailing lessons on, to a ferocious weapon that I can hunt people down with and generally turn my wetsuits a browner shade of black, merely depend- ing on whether you asked it to or not. That is something we’ve never achieved. We’ve achieved ‘nice dinghy. Probably a
niche somewhere’ and ‘it nearly killed me but, wow, what a ride!’ We’ve never hit both at once and all the points in between in one boat. To my mind, that fusion of uses is critical and it answers why I got into this business in the first place. Since I left oppi sailing for skiffs when I
was 11 I’ve been increasingly worried by the attrition I’ve seen among my sailing friends. I went into one path and expected all my friends to have pursued others. But for the most part, whenever I spoke to my old sailing buddies from my childhood, the vast majority had simply abandoned the sport after the programme component of it ended. As a passionate sailor this has increasingly alarmed me as I grew into adulthood and gained full faculties to understand what I was seeing.
56 SEAHORSE You wouldn’t know it, but youth sail-
ing, measured in number of people, at least in north America, constitutes the over- whelming majority of the sport. You wouldn’t know because it also suffers from staggering attrition as people find the oppi a bad fit, or racing not to their liking, or later the 420 a bad fit thanks to not liking their teammate, or later college racing thanks to not being the right weight, and so on and so on. The sport takes in wave after wave of children annually and then subjects them to reasons to leave. Some stay. Some others come back when they’re about 38 or so and have money. A good deal of boats are geared towards the ‘returning sailors’ but far fewer return than left. Somewhere between 11 and 38 there’s a
desert… which could be less hostile than it is. I see this problem from my perspective, as a builder. I walked into my dad’s shop at the age of five and basically never left. And if you are a builder and you see people leaving boats for other things you naturally conclude that making the boat better might at least in some way have led to some people staying. Surely there are many factors in play.
However, if the activity is to use a technol- ogy (sailboat) it would be insanity not to at least partially question the quality of the technology used as a factor in people ceasing the activity. At the very least one should discuss the diversity, if any, of technology available. Surely it would help in at least some
way to bring down costs, increase ease of use and increase fun output, at least for some of those who would otherwise cease to use the technology. And even if it only helps by five per cent, if that’s five per cent of the largest attrition figure in the sport, excluding death by old age, then it’s
probably a good thing. Slowly but surely, that’s what the UFO
has done, as well as a couple of other rather interesting things, like providing an avenue for older guys to try flying without getting smashed to bits. With the afore- mentioned luxury-to-insanity gradient we’ve apparently cast a very broad net, as essentially everybody falls somewhere on the boat’s learning curve and performance offering. It’s a rewarding home to many skill levels, ages, bodies and budgets and this has allowed it to grow. Now the whole project (thanks for bear-
ing with me, Mom) is long gone from dad’s barn and now occupies a 4,800ft2
UFO
factory in Rhode Island, where a veteran production crew churn them out with focus and tenacity. My day job is to facili- tate, mainly by making sure everybody has what they need and staying out of the way. We’ve shipped UFOs to owners in
France, Switzerland, Sweden, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, Japan and Tanzania. The bulk of our boats, however, have gone to owners in the United States, most notably in the northeast, within 150 miles of us. Which makes us a strangely farm-to-table factory. I’ve been phenomenally lucky to have
got so far, gained the advice and help that I got, the team that I got, and even to grow up in Bristol, where I’m now able to leave work, walk 45 seconds to the water, kick my UFO off the beach and be foiling in two minutes, in a boat that seems not to care if it’s blowing zero or 30kt. I am grateful to the UFO. We come in peace. We come to bring
you the joy of flying, distilled and without contaminating factors. Join us. Dave Clark, Bristol RI
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