EFFICIENCY
The thing I love about speed sailing is we never stop learning and going faster. Remember it was only in 1983; 34 years ago that Fred Hayward broke the 30 knot barrier, now Antoine’s record is over 53 and I’m at 46.49 knots, who knows what the limits are? The future I believe is in getting more efficiency out of our equipment and getting away from the need for apocalyptic winds we need today. An illustration of this for me came this year when I broke Karin’s record buy a small margin at 46.49 knots in about 45 knots of wind and the top boys were hitting 49 knots over 500m. When Karin did it only two years ago the likes of Antoine Albeau, Patrick Diethelm and Mark Grinnell were hitting 52 plus knot runs in winds thumping 60 knots.
The best example of how efficient sailing craft can be, is Sailrocket, a one off experimental boat, which holds the outright world sailing record at 65.45 knots and Paul Larson and his team achieved this incredible speed in only 27 knots of wind. That’s almost 3 times the speed of the wind. We need to tap into this effectiveness to take windsurfing speed to the next level and who knows we may not need a man made canal to do it on. Will I be going back…. not sure? I believe given the right conditions and the ever-improving speed kit I think I can go faster. So watch this space.