Foils - the work of God or the devil?

Hobie TriFoiler designer Greg Ketterman and RMW Marine's Richard Woof give their views

So are foilers the future of sailing as we know it or are they an ugly abomination of our sport that should be exiled to Siberia? Will sailors of the future be laughing at the generation of sailors who used to sail through the water rather than over it? Or will they be viewed as the Al Queda of the sailing world?

While foilers have been around for decades it is interesting that it appears to have taken a palace revolution in the Moth class to bring them closer to the mainstream. Suddenly there are a reasonable number of elite sailors around the world who are inspired by something new, a fresh challenge. And this is the very reason why the foiler Moth may succeed in getting more sailors flying above the water. Because highly credible sailors such as Rohan Veal, Brett Burville, Adam May, Graham Vials, etc are now involved the perception is that there must be something in it and there is also the likelihood of competitive racing.

Perhaps the internet and email have played their part, allowing lines of communication to open between designers, builders and sailors in Australia, the UK, USA, Europe and the rest of the world to share and swap ideas. Perhaps technology and modern materials like carbon fibre have too.

There are also trend issues. The Hobie TriFoiler (below) has been around for more than a decade now and along with the Windrider Rave it is easy to see the potential for the same, if not more, of a buzz sailing one of these even than getting airborne in a Moth. They are easy to handle, perfectly manoeuvrable boats that sail at incredible speeds and gybe so fast that you experience G-force of Ferrari proportions. But the reason why you don't see these craft at your local club is probably much the same as the argument over why everyone doesn't race catamarans - they don't look like boats/it is a different sport/they don't behave like my Laser. Possibly they are even too easy and require less skill to sail.



Below are the viewpoints of RMW Marine's Richard Woof, a well known advocate of performance sailing and Greg Ketterman, the designer of Russell Long's speed sailor Longshot and subsequently its production equivalent, the Hobie Tri-Foiler. Greg is now Vice President of Engineering at Hobie Cat in California.

If readers wish to add to the debate you views will be published by emailling us here .

Greg Ketterman:

It amazes me that no one has done any further development on the TriFoiler concepts in the last 13 years since we first got some exposure with the TriFoiler.

In my opinion (which is obviously biased, but easily argued) the TriFoiler is faster, more efficient and handles better than any other sailboat in winds above 10 knots. Longshot could sail 2.5 times wind speed in winds between 10-14 knots and is the fastest symmetric boat in the world. You can look at video of the TriFoilers and compare it to other foilers and see how well the TriFoiler maintains its altitude through rough water, gusts and gybes.

I have never stopped thinking about foilers. I am still convinced that foilers are the future of high performance sailing. It seems it should be possible to build a boat with the speed and handling of the TriFoiler, but improve the light air performance and the practicality. The rough water performance of the TriFoiler is way underrated, but I am trying to improve rough water performance as well.

Recently I have built an RC model and an 18ft prototype and we are in the testing phase with both of these (this is not the best time of year for testing here in Oceanside, California). We do not have any real good results yet so I am not ready to show you.
At present I do not have a real clear objective, we are just testing a bunch of different concepts, but I am leaning toward a boat with the same objectives as Cheyenne, Castorama B&Q or Yves Parlier's new boat.


Richard Woof:

TheDailySail: What do you think the future of foils is?

Richard Woof: Interesting. I think it is a completely new subject.

TDS: Some people think it will be a separate sport to sailing as we know it?

RW: I totally agree with that. It will be a completely different machine in that there are other parameters to take into account. There is the boat’s and crew’s windage and all sorts of other aspects. It is very exciting. I have got a weather eye on the opportunity.
As far as fully flying dinghies are concerned, to be quite frank - they look ridiculous and for instance with the Moth, you don’t have to fly it that high out of the water. Something a little bit less extreme than the area they are into would prove better and be easier to sail and be more reliable around the track. It would be equally as quick but it would just smooth off the peaks and troughs of the speed. The other problem with them is that although they are quick they don’t have particularly remarkable VMG. They are good, but they rely on their ultimate speed not their height. I think for the Moths it is tremendous and Brett Burville and the guys who did the 14 foiler deserve full marks for endeavour.

Phil Morrison designed some foils for Alaistair Richardson and Pete Greenhalgh's 49er and Red Bull paid for it. It was pretty spectacular, but the boat does look pretty ridiculous. You have a wapping great hull out of the water and a massive amount of windage. So a different approach needs to be taken.

TDS: Moth has a pretty minimal hull - that is probably going in the right direction?

RW: Yes, but if you look at it and it still has got whopping great wings with nets strapped on to them and you just look at it and you think you could do something so much neater.

TDS: Is it something which you are looking at?

RW: Yes, I think there is an opportunity to do a complete foiler. People have done it on the basis of having to fit it into a framework of class rules which is the wrong way of doing it. You need to throw book completely away.

TDS: What are you thinking in term of?

RW: I built the hull for Clive’s boat. That probably will be the neatest attempt to date. The hull is quite minimal. It is part of a RS300 hull, the bit underwater at least - there isn’t much above it! It is incredibly sleek. So something even more minimalistic than that. It could be a completely different sport. At the moment the difficulty is that people will be held over by a little bit of convention. ‘Oh what the hell is that?’ Oh, a dinghy with foils. We’ll go with a dinghy with foils but that is possibly not the best solution. So I think a really minimalistic approach. Some of the fastest applications may be along the windsurfer line.

TDS: Will people buy them to go racing or just to go for a blast?

RW: I think for a bit of fun, but who knows? Did anyone foresee people racing windsurfers? I don’t know. At one stage it was a just fun thing and then as we know people just like to compete whether it is a bath with a tea towel or something designed for racing.

TDS: There appear to be several ways it could evolve. You can have one tack wonders that are built just for speed at one extreme and others that somehow go well around a race course in all conditions?

RW: Absolutely that is very much the case. The problem also lies in that you have a lower wind band in which they don’t work. Given that even with the most minimalist crew weight, you still have a certain amount of weight to lift, be that 60 or 100kg, so that obviously creates a lower wind band in which you would not perform and it would look pretty dull compared to a lot of other classes out there. It is like the windsurfer, they don’t bother unless it is blowing more than 20 knots.

TDS: What about retractible foils? Are there prospects of a hybrid?

RW: Ultimately if you are looking to race something you’d have something which you could deploy or retract, but you start to get quite complicated. For instance if you take an International 14 at the moment, it is a half way house. It has an improved performance because the foil does give partial lift as well as pitch stability and that has created quite an improvement in performance. And that, unless it is very very light, as which point you are not looking at racing – certainly at a serious championship you wouldn’t be racing - they are fine tuned to a reasonable degree where deploying them all the time is fine. However if you are looking for more lift to get the hull all out of the water then I would feel that at very low speeds you’d want to be able to retract certainly one of the lifting devices and that adds complication and expense that most classes wouldn’t be able to cope with.

At the moment the 14 is a really nice balance, I feel because the boat looks dead sexy and the boat goes like stink. It would be very interesting at the moment to find how much difference there is between a 14 and a 49er now, now the 14 has come along another route. We’ll find that out in the next few months when we put Rob and Dan up against Chris and Simon to have a look.

The 14s, let’s not forget, have also done a fully foil-born boat but it doesn’t stay up for very long. The control is much trickier because the rig on the 14 is much more complicated whereas the Moth is just one sail. They have devised a clever but quite simple trimming system.

So there are all sorts of things that can be done to improve the performance of the boats, but just how practical they are is the key. Obviously if you look at a C-Class cat, the rig is massively efficient but you can’t capsize one without pretty much righting the rig off. There is a route and there is with foils as well. They do get damaged. They are not ideal so you need a balance. You can make some wonderful machines, but they would have to be mollycoddled.

TDS: So will we see an RMW foiler?

RW: It is just a concept at he moment. I think it is a couple of years away. The market needs a shake down a little bit first. Breaking ground on that one to start with could be very very tough.

If readers wish to add to the debate you views will be published by emailling us here .