The world sailing speed record has been broken by a French trimeran foil boat.
The l'hydroptere' recorded a speed of 51 knots over a nautical mile and speeds of up to 55 knots in 25 gusting to 28 knots of wind.
HOLY CRAP!!! This thing is crazy fast!
Here is a link to a video I found on Youtube of a previous record they broke.
i love this thing. the sheer insanity and ingenuity of such a vessel is incredible.
Awesome!
I guess it will just be a matter of time before someone breaks that speed on a hydrofoil and kite?????
I can't see it happening on foil board, the mechanics of the system when using a kite means that you have to lean against the pull of the kite , this doesn't really sit well with a foilboard type arrangement as the foil will be pulling on an angle in the water etc, it would be too hard to balance. the best bet is to get a super low CoF board setup and run at super high speed on a broad reach, like the guys at luderitz and namibia are doing right now, in shallow water to take advantage of ground effect. either that or rig up a multi-foil arrangement on some weird type of board, to keep it flat?
This boat is insane. It's 60' long, and as it starts planning they have to pull sails down, and furl headsails. They have flipped this this a number of times. For a long time they had a barrier of about 40 knots then FLIP. When I worked for North Sails, the sail designer had done some work on this this, so they have been trying for a very long time. I first saw this boat (or one of it's earlier models) back in 1997. Good on them to keep going with it. Imagin flipping a 60 foot board at 35+ knots
JB
51.38 to be a little more exact - still hasn't been ratified hope they get it, good to see the bar being pushed.
It's even more impresive seeing as they just finished putting it back together after pitch poling doing 40 knots and smashing her to bits not so long ago 
Hi guys,
Here is a bit more and follows on from what JB was saying
Wow - that thing is insanity at it's finest. 
There was talk in some threads recently about pushing the boundaries to progress a sport, and I am pretty sure that I am not the only person who thinks these guys are on the right track (and jumping buildings is not).
I'm pretty sure these guys have flipped this thing quite a few times. Must be so hard to trim when you know if you stuff up, your taking 6 other guys and a couple a million bucks with you. Look how fast the trim the sails and change coarse, these guy really know how to work together.
JB
Neil there's already a number of hydrofoils been used with kites at speed without any problems of countering the pull against the kite - in fact one of the pioneers of the sport, Cory Roeseler, was kiting with an "air chair" circa 1995 including back-loops.
Not long afterward Laird Hamilton developed a stand-up foil board with bindings and used it for both kiting and tow-in surfing www.gizmodo.com.au/?r=US
www.hydrofoil.org/history.html is also interesting
The beauty of the hydrofoil is that it dramaticly reduces the impact of water surface chop on speed limits.
We are lucky enough to have a world-class hydrofoil designer in Perth, John Ilett, who has designed such efficient hydrofoils that a canoeist can paddle clean out of the water - see www.fastacraft.com/index.html
Yeah i know, but pulling massive speed with one on a conventional type kite-foil-board? i just can't see it happening. Most of the guys who've used foilboards with a kite seem to report that you have to go at a certain speed, not too fast, not too slow, or the foil becomes massively unstable due to extremely slight variations in the angle of attack causing massive changes in the delivered lift. I believe this would be an exponential relationship as well - meaning that you would essentially need to optimise a particular foil for an extremely narrow band of operational flow velocity, which would become increasingly more narrow as the speed ramped up. frankly i can't see it being possible to reach massive speeds with current technologies on a conventional-type foilboard, but i'm super happy to be proven wrong!
Thats a load of old malachite!!! I went quicker on me 10m Evo in the river!! Boats are too slow and sailed by toffs!!
