Left: Eric Tabarly’s Paul Ricard was the product of a friendship with Dassault Aviation chief designer Alain de Bergh. But executing the project in aluminium, the lightest practical material at the time, was problematic as the weight kept on creeping upwards. Though she had mixed results on the racecourse in 1980 Tabarly’s foiler became the first boat to break Charlie Barr’s 1905 transatlantic record on the schooner Atlantic. Tabarly’s interest in foiling was sparked off again a few years later following an encounter with a young Alain Thébault and he was a keen supporter of Thébault’s successful Hydroptère project. The success of a foil retro-fit to a modern monohull like Isabelle Joschke’s Imoca Macsf (above) depends on the boat being light enough for the foils to do any good; Macsf is among the best examples – the first Verdier/VPLP Imoca was built very light (8-tonnes) by her aerospace sponsor Safran in 2007 and over the next five years more weight was steadily pared off the boat – including switching to a machined titanium keel fin… Macsf is now proving surprisingly competitive against more recent boats, finishing an impressive fifth in the Défi Azimut speed trials


be named Paul Ricard after the pastis company that underwrote their efforts. From the outset there were difficulties.


Their calculations made it clear early on that aluminium, the most common mater- ial for building big sailboats at that time, would not be up to the task of managing the anticipated loads on the foils. The foils were to be placed on the outer hulls and they (correctly) anticipated that when all three hulls came out of the water the loads placed on those foils would be enormous. In 1975 the French magazine Neptune


Nautisme published a rendering of Paul Ricard on its cover. It showed struts on either side attached to the mast, passing through a single cross-beam and attaching to the foils. The load from the foil would be translated through the strut and borne by the mast. The boat was originally scheduled to participate in the 1976 Ostar but things progressed slowly. Construction did not finally begin until 1979 with the boat launched late that summer. By then they had done away with the struts, having figured out a better engineering solution. Paul Ricard was a groundbreaking boat


by any measure. There were many teething issues, just as one would expect from a project that ambitious. They quickly replaced the first mast with a lighter spar, changed the cross-beam angles and added buoyancy to the floats. But by the middle of 1980 Tabarly was


ready to try to set a new transatlantic record from Sandy Hook, New Jersey to


Lizard Point. The record had been estab- lished in 1905 by the legendary skipper Charlie Barr aboard the schooner Atlantic and been unbeaten ever since. With a crew of four Paul Ricard left New York and went on to knock just under two full days off a record that had stood for 75 years. At the time, and for good reasons, many


had thought that foiling would always be limited to inshore sailing conditions but both Williwaw and Paul Ricard proved that there were big performance benefits to be gained offshore as well. How much it helped depended, of course, on the point of sail and the conditions, but overall the foils were doing exactly what was expected of them: increasing performance. But the development of foiling boats


used strictly for inshore sailing was also having some success and would lead even- tually to today’s best-known example of the International Moth, where mainstream foiling took over the class in the mid- noughties following the 2005 world championship victory of Australian foiling pioneer Rohan Veal… who had won all seven races across a mix of conditions. The Moth class had been around since


the early part of the last century. It started out as a cheap-to-build, hard-chine, flat- bottom scow. Interestingly the class first came about from two main groups of sailors on opposite sides of the world developing a similar boat. There was one group in Australia and another in America. In 1933 the American


yachting magazine Rudder published an article about the Moth scene in the US. The Australians noted the similarities between the two groups and realised that the boats were very close in design so they took on the same name: Moth. There were some differences between the two boats, mostly in the sailplan, but they were 13,000 miles apart and in the middle of the Great Depression so no attempt was made to reconcile those differences. This resulted in two large Moth classes being developed separately for over 30 years. Other Moth classes were also developing,


most notably in the UK. Then in 1971 there was an attempt to bring all the various Moth fleets under a single rule. Initially the ‘new’ class flourished, but then it started to die off with disparate groups once more doing their own thing. It was only years later when the class association decided to allow these ‘new’ foils that a huge resurgence in the class began and the Moth has led the way in foiling ever since. In 2019 it remains the pre- ferred ‘training vehicle’ of choice for every active and wannabe America’s Cup sailor. Foils on sailboats use the same scientific


principles as a wing on an aircraft. Just as an aeroplane’s wing will lift it up off the ground and into the air, the foils on a yacht will do the same thing and lift the boat out of the water. Aircraft use engines to generate enough speed so that the air going over the wing is going fast enough to generate enough of a force to lift the air- craft off the ground. Same with a sailboat.


SEAHORSE 63


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VINCENT CURUTCHET/ALEA


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