Crazy Sick multi-hull sailing video with some board and kite

[ammisco]

I friend I used to crew with on lightings sent me this link.

http://www.grandprixpetitnavire.com/defi/video.php

The site is in French. The videos are large files but worth the wait.
Use google translate if you don't understand French.

Andy

[DimitriMilovich]

Andy,
Outrageous footage. Thanks for posting it!

[ammisco]

I have never seen wind powered boats go so fast! (except ice boats)

I would like to be the person who is water skiing behind them.

[RickHeninger]

Talk about some nice sailboats... Holy cow!

Was that John D. and George W. wakeboarding behind Carl C. at Deer Crick?! he he

That is too dang cool... I've always wondered about that!

[Carl Christensen]

Wow. I'd like to see one of those tri hulls glide by someday. You gotta love the footage aft with the wakes just strung out into the distance. I need to take the time to watch the rest of the videos. Rick, were you out yesterday at DC?

[Josh Shirley]

I am most impressed with the size of those boats. Their masts seem to be twice the height of the kites they keep passing. How long are kiter lines? 80 feet?
Very impressive. looks like a lot of fun.

You know those boats are fast when they pass up Finian Maynard.

[RickHeninger]

Carl,

Dang man! Circumstances have caused me to miss these great days up at DC this weekend... I wish I would've been able to catch one of them. I am Jonesing big time!

[bigwavedave]

Pretty cool boat. Though it's dang fast for a sailboat that size . . I'm pretty sure it's not even close to Finian Maynard's speed. If you think about it - most wakeboarders aren't going to be hanging on after about 25 mhp so it's likely we've all gone faster than this rig on our windsurf gear.

[Emmanuel Pons]

Pretty cool boat. Though it's dang fast for a sailboat that size . . I'm pretty sure it's not even close to Finian Maynard's speed. .

Yeah winds were marginals.. A top speed you will notice they don't have the wakeboarders behind them!

Dimitrije pointed out that the site has a link to the best speed (I think it was the speed week of Brest).

Faster windsurfer at the event: 19 knot... far below what a good sailboarder can do in the open ocean
Fastest boat at the event : 29 knots which is pretty damn fast!

[lesvierra]

That is fast. Those guys were cruzin. Do they ever catch an edge, get alittle to much wind, make a mistake at the controls, kind of like a mortal on a hobbie cat. Thatd be scary.

[Josh Shirley]

I was actually referring to end of the third video. Finian gets interviewed then they show footage of him out on the water. Then one of the tri hull boats about runs him over.

I don't imagine they could get anywhere near the world record mark he has set.

But for a cruising speed on a wind powered vessel those boats are fast.
Is that 19 knots averaged for the whole distance or is that top speed?
World record for a windsurfer speed for a whole hour is 25.7 mph. That is a long distance without any mistakes.

[Carl Christensen]

I've been watching the MegaCats for a few years. What's a Mega class cat? Probably anything in the 100ft or above region although they have been getting successively bigger with most now 125-150ft long. They are getting pretty freakin' outrageous and the speeds are downright insane. How about around the world open class racing, absolutely dominated by multihulls, with boats sustaining speeds of 40, read it, 40 knots in heavy weather if what I've been reading is accurate. The captains and sailors have some serious cajones to carry that kind of heat taking turns manning the equipment and sleeping below deck in the flying hulls. It is unimagineable to me. Failures, as you might expect, are not uncommon.

[Carl Christensen]

Sick.

[DimitriMilovich]

Check out this article in Wired mag about the perils of open ocean multihull racing: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/sail.html

Also, there was a huge catamaran a couple years ago called Team Phillips, built in the UK that was supposed to race around the world. Largest ever built, surrounded by all the hype imaginable. 120 feet long, with 135 foot masts "taller than ten double decker buses stacked". Designed by

Christened by the Queen herself. First sail out, bits of it broke. Second time out in the open sea, the whole thing broke up. The crew got rescued luckily, and pieces of the boat were found years later. The guy who started the whole project has a new one, but it's aimed at rowing, not sailing. The French are much better at multihulls than the English were with Team Phillips. They've been building these fast craft for 30 or so years and steadily getting faster and faster.

I saw one of the big ones, Banc Populaire, some years ago, from atop a high headland on the coast of France. There were 100's of boats out on a sunny day, the wind was blowing and this enormous tri ripped through the fleet like a shark through minnows and sailed out of sight.

[RickHeninger]

Great article Dimitri... I was thinking about how scary it would be to flip one of those big cats when I first saw the video. What did les call it, a mortal? I haven't heard the term, but sounds scary... I can't imagine the forces put on some of the angles of that thing while sailing in high wind, tilted up at 45 degrees. at a width of 100 or more feet, that would be some serious distance to be thrown fall or even if you go with the thing even more serious rotational velocity at the end of that radius!

Obviously, we're far to windless here this fall!

But that article talks about circumnavigation for on a sailboat and mentions powerboats for a sec. Of course, we're not into the powerboat thing too much. However, the hydrodynamics are very interesting... This site, I believe John D. sent in a email a while back really caught my interest... Check this out...

http://www.earthrace.net

Oh, I don't think a Megacat will ever be able to come close to beating the Finyan or the smaller freaky Sailboats like the Endeavor Yellow Pages (whatever it is)...