It's reportedly an American Journalist, Bruce Knecht, who has made the claim. Granted, it's separated by 2 degrees - the article says he said it.

edit; there's also a video of him talking about it. Something's not right there - They have to be getting some terminology confused. There's no way they were pumping the main at speed to do what he claims; "to get the boat on it's foils". They can foil upwind at anytime by just canting the foil but didn't do so very often because the foil born configuration allowed the boat to side slip too much. Oracle seemed to foot and lightly foil upwind when they saw a shift or pressure on the other side of the course that they wanted to get to. They could obviously foil easily downwind. It is nonsensical.

Finally, it took them two days to get us some video of the capsize.

WOW!! This has a sphincter factor of 10.0!
Watch the video first and then read about it here.

Good stuff.
Part 1: AC50 building program

“That point is lost on many people,” says Smyth. “If we had too rigid a measurement protocol the measurers would be disappearing up their own backsides trying to accurately check the boats."

Part 2: AC50 construction uncovered - Wings and Costs

“Limiting the boards to just four will be dangerous. The teams can’t even build an identical spare without sacrificing a ‘card’– they are supposed to repair them when they are broken. I think it is a glaring anomaly,” Smyth explains.

Awesome day in Chicago. Both NZ and Oracle capsize!

Slingsby's take



Capsize video

and Oracle

Colbert took a ride on the AC45

[quote=P.M.]Awesome day in Chicago. Both NZ and Oracle capsize!



Lol, That is my new favorite AC pic!

wow. upwind foil tacking. That's going to make for some exciting racing...BIG chance for mistakes, big speed, big changes.

And Jobson will still call it "lee bow maneuver"

and Oracle pulls it off a couple of days later. Here's the video.

Checkout this video from the kiwis, going dead downwind at something like 30kts.
It's passing those yachts as if they're anchored!

we used to have cats and dogs..... in 2016.... what do you call THAT.... It is positively alien to the sailing world!

awesome!

Mark, Not really so alien anymore. Foiling is flooding into sailing faster than the switch to: Marconi rigs, fiberglass hulls, aluminum masts, mylar sails, spinnakers on cats, etc., etc. It is available on more and more boats and when the UFO comes out next year it will be the equivalent of the Laser for foiling due to its ease of use and low price. In ten years it (sail foiling) will be common.

Well predicting the future is always dicey...I am not so sure how much market penetration foiling will experience. I am not sold on the foiling laser for instance (grin).... Better does not mean popular... for example....I would have predicted that carbon masts, (Nacra 20, Tornado, A cats monohulls proved the point.., AND would have become the defacto standard on modern performance beach cats over the last 10 years... yet. alu wing masts replaced alu teardrop masts on F18s and F16s.


You can go racing on anything that gets a loyal group of fans... See Hobie Waves.... Hell, I saw an Aquacat fleet in MD about 5 years ago going racing (well sort of racing). It seems to be difficult to build a performance fleet in any small sail boat.... The A class proved that foiling was possible under their rules 5 years ago... yet half the boats remain floating and the Class is running a survey in 2016 about what to do with the cat and dog issue at championship events. Just ask RSX how that goes in the states for adults... or the 29ner in the states for juniors its been 15 years for the 29ners... So... just because boats fly does not mean that a strong class will emerge and thus be "normal sailing boats". (I bet that more new Hobie 16s are purchased by unique owners then Nacra 17s in North America... just like waverunners eclipse jet ski's. being more challenging does not mean popularity)

In 2016... I bet more people have seen the Flying Cup boats and Flying Kite boards, likely on TV.... Both look alien. One is unobtanium and the other is a cool toy. My buddy is on the build list for a Waszp.....because its a cheap cool toy for the handful of times the breeze is up... the UFO could fill the less athletic/limber niche.... but still a single purpose toy. If these two boats remain at the "cool toy" level of interest... 10 years down the road... flying boats will still be pretty rare on the water and still "alien and mostly found on TV... not your local pond OR at any of the major boat shows.

Good points, Mark. I'm leaning a bit toward the UFO myself as it appears to be more stable in non-foiling mode (which is likely 85% of the time). Kind of like a little 14 foot cat...

As I get older and fewer people willing to put up with me on a boat, I see the attraction to singlehanders. If this UFO is reasonable in terms of (wo)man-handling on the beach/car, and doesn't require an unreasonable amount of setup/breakdown, it could serve folks like me rather well.

Mark, I don't know what you mean by referring to the UFO as a single purpose toy. It is more versatile than most little boats as it can do anything they can do AND foil when the wind comes up a bit. Jay, the UFO is only 9' long. At Foiling week I tried the Stunt 9 or S9 which IS 14' long. It features two Moth like main T foils but at $22K I decided that you may as well pay another $3K and get an Exploder A Class cat. The UFO is designed specifically to make foiling as easy as possible for the sailor. That means the minimum in size and weight to handle for a sailor up to 180 pounds. It means being able to raise the foils in the boat so that it can be easily cat traxed in and out of the water or even pulled up on a beach or a ramp like a standard beach cat (although this is a tunnel-hulled dinghy). It can be easily car topped and set-up is quick and easy. They are aiming for a $9K price which is a lot for a little boat but cheap for a foiler. It would be a great replacement for the thousands of old, worn out Lasers and Sunfishes across the land - the foiling ability is just the exciting "but wait, there's more"!

Wow, that is a great first hand report Mike. I hope the Clark's do hit a grand slam with this boat... I am not sure the better mouse trap will win out... Marketing boats in this day and age seem to be extremely challenging. Ha... the irony of the multihull world considering the moving to single handed foilers.

Foiling is actually moving pretty slowly, as shown by the simple numbers. Apart from the fact that the first foilers were about 55 years ago and the Trifoiler was around 20+ years ago, the "modern" foilers have been around for about 15 years. There have been about 100 Flying Phantoms, around 700 Moths, a bunch of A Class and a few others sold in that time. Say 1400 boats - that's about as many new foilers as there have been new 420 dinghies in the same period, and far fewer than new RS Fevas. Formula 18s alone have sold over 700 boats in the same period, and a bunch of dinghies are more popular than the F18. Hell, something like 900 Beneteau 40.7s and a similar number of Lagoon 380s and Benny 36.7s have been sold during a similar period.

Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of windsurfers sold in a similar timeframe, the 30,000++ dinghies sold each year in the '60s, or the 1100 RS Aero dinghies sold in about two and a half years and we can see that foiling, while loads of fun, isn't really showing much sign of becoming a really popular part of the sport. That's fine - lots of small niches are fantastic. It's just a worry when so many people are hyping one small niche as if it's going to really help to revive the sport, especially when by implication they are denigrating the rest of sailing.


On a different note - when the UFO wasn't foiling, how fast was it? It's a cool idea, but from a quick look it's hard to see it being quick in light stuff, since once off the foils it is basically a very short cat.