No turning back


Offshore (and inshore) foiling has been around a lot longer than many people may realise. And however big the issues, with time and ingenuity almost every problem along the way was eventually resolved. Brian Hancock believes that history tells us that what we see today is barely the beginning…


In the early 20th century two Americans, Orville and Wilbur Wright, were pioneer- ing flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. On the opposite side of the Atlantic an Italian inventor by the name of Enrico Forlanini was also pursuing flight, but of a very different kind. Forlanini was an Italian engineer, inven-


tor and aeronautical pioneer who had made some big strides in flight and in fact had developed an early helicopter powered by a steam engine. At the same time as he was working on his helicopter Forlanini


62 SEAHORSE


was also developing a foiling boat. He had started modelling hydrofoils,


beginning as early as 1898, and in 1906 he built a full-scale craft using a ladder system of foils, and with a 60hp engine driving two counter-rotating air props he man- aged to foil the boat to a top speed of 37kt. It was the original birth of the flying sail- boat and the start of what we are currently witnessing with a flood of brand new, incredibly sophisticated Imocas, AC75s, Minis and many other prototype craft. Over the past hundred years foiling has


come into fashion and gone out of fashion as sailors and designers struggle with that old dilemma – the desire for innovation always held in check by the need to keep costs down and keep sailing simple enough to grow in a homogenous way. Fortu- nately every now and then someone cries ‘to hell with it’ and wades back into the foiling world and changes the way we think about flying a boat above the waves. In the late 1960s the American David


Keiper built a 31ft foiling trimaran which he named Williwaw. Keiper sailed the boat over 20,000 miles, from California to Hawaii and later into the South Pacific.


Along the way he showed that a simple foiling package could be safe and vastly increase the performance of the boat. In 1969 Keiper happened to be in San


Francisco at the same time that the great Eric Tabarly was there aboard his big alloy trimaran Pen Duick IV. The two raced against each other but Williwaw had too many crew onboard and struggled to get onto its foils. It was a chance meeting but one that would later have a significant impact on foiling sailboats. Fast forward to 1974 and another


improbable meeting. The French company Dassault Aviation were looking to take their knowledge into other fields and the boss of the company thought it a good idea to invite the most famous sailor in France to pay a visit. Eric Tabarly had by then proved himself


including winning the Ostar solo transat- lantic race and was well known outside sailing circles. In fact, by now he was a household name across France and much of Europe. When Tabarly visited Dassault he met their chief aeronautical engineer Alain de Bergh and their friendship pro- duced a foiling trimaran which would later


BATEAUX/DPPI


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