Seen from across Walvis Bay, the windswept patch of Atlantic Ocean known as Speed Spot is barely more than a sparkle of whitecaps against a long, low sandbar. As we get closer to what is one of the world’s most perfect speed-sailing areas, I scan the shore. It’s featureless save for two small shelters. We motor our zodiac toward the remote beach until we have to kill the outboard and tilt it up to spare the prop. The five of us jump overboard into the waist-deep water, following our guide, Paul Larsen, who is wading toward the shore. The wind howls in our faces, blowing so much sand that it runs down the beach in rivulets, like rain across a windshield. We climb up on the beach, jellyfish at our feet as thick as paving stones. “This is it. This is the Bonneville Salt Flats of speed sailing!” Larsen shouts, gesturing to the water just off the sandbar. The flying sand sticks to our teeth, turning the insides of our mouths to 600-grit with every word. “We’ll have to shovel out the timing hut,” Larsen says, peering into the primitive shelter he built years ago and pointing out animal tracks inside. “Jackal,” he concludes.
There is a shipping port on the far side of the bay, but over here the landscape is so desolate, so extreme, that we could be on an alien planet—Frank Herbert’s Arrakis, George Lucas’ Tatooine. In fact, we are in Namibia, a roughly Texas-sized country at the southwest corner of the African continent. Walvis Bay is one of the Atlantic’s great natural harbors, but it’s surrounded by emptiness: 31,000 square miles of desert. The dunes march right into the sea, setting up an elemental cycle that repeats itself nearly every day of the antipodal summer. Mornings break as clear and sunny as a Baywatch shoot, but in the afternoon, near-gale-force winds descend on the bay. The desert heat meeting the cool Benguela Current coming up from the Cape of Good Hope creates a powerful natural wind machine. It arrives like clockwork, steady and relentless. “No ruffles,” Larsen says, feeling the wind with his hand. The featureless landscape—no vegetation, no terrain, no fences, no buildings apart from the shelters—makes for perfectly organized air. “Attached flow,” he calls it, using the jargon of an aerodynamicist evaluating a successful wind-tunnel test.
Larsen is originally from Australia, but he searched the world for years to find this spot, a perfect natural runway to test a sailboat so radical that it is more at home in an airplane hangar than in any harbor—a futuristic craft that, if he can make it work, will not only capture the outright world speed-sailing record but also open up a new, no-limit era in sailing. “A hundred knots, maybe?” Larsen speculates from inside one of the huts, looking through a sandblasted window at the watery speed-sailing course just beyond the beach. The current record is just over 50.
Floating behind the zodiac is the boat that has brought Larsen to Speed Spot for the tenth time in as many years in pursuit of sailing’s speed record: the Vestas SailRocket Mark 2. Its aeronautical DNA is obvious at a glance. There’s a rigid carbon-fiber “wing” that functions as a sail, an ultra-streamlined 40-foot-long “fuselage,” and even something like landing gear—three pod-shaped floats that keep the wing and fuselage above the chop. Yet what looks at first glance like a water-striding sailplane is, on closer inspection, pure crazytown. For one thing, its wing is inclined at a 30-degree angle to the water and is nowhere near the fuselage. Instead, it’s mounted on the end of a 30-foot-long beam. The pole is, in a sense, an odd sort of mast—except that it runs horizontally. On the opposite side of the boat is a bladelike carbon-fiber fin. Technically this is the keel, or as Larsen calls it, the foil. SailRocket’s foil sprouts from the side of its fuselage, then turns to cut 3 feet down into the water. Critical to any sailboat, a keel keeps a boat from blowing over—or, in this case, from flying away.
“She’s 50 percent plane, 50 percent boat,” Larsen explains. Indeed, if SailRocket were dropped from a great height, it would glide down rather than fall. Larsen designed in aerodynamic stability as a safety measure. “If for some reason she lost the keel at speed,” Larsen explains, “than she really would be a plane, wouldn’t she?” The prototype version of SailRocket, Mark 1, actually did take off into the air, and Larsen survived what may be the most spectacular crash in sailing history.
It was 2008 and he was at Speed Spot putting the Mark 1 through its paces when a gust got under the boat and launched it clear into the sky. The half-plane/half-boat hit an altitude of between 40 and 50 feet while cartwheeling through a flip—before crash-landing upside down and backward. “It just kept going up and up,” Larsen said at the time, “then it hit bloody hard on my head.”
Larsen is confident enough about the stability of his revised design, the Mark 2, that he included a passenger cockpit behind the driver’s seat. It’s never held a passenger, however. “I haven’t installed the seat yet,” Larsen says, “but I’m going to have to test it out sooner or later …” He cocks an eyebrow in my direction. “Would that be good for your story?”
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How a Boat-Plane Hybrid Shattered the Sound Barrier of Sailing
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How a Boat-Plane Hybrid Shattered the Sound Barrier of Sailing
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How a Boat-Plane Hybrid Shattered the Sound Barrier of Sailing
