CHASING 80 KNOTS
‘By the time you’ve realised what’s happening, it’s happened’
It was 24 November, 2012 when Paul Larsen and his Sailrocket team rewrote our understanding of the physics of sailboats, stamping their names indelibly in the record books. A little over a week earlier, at a spot called Walvis Bay on the coast of Namibia, Sailrocket 2 had pushed the outright sailing speed record up by the biggest-ever margin – from 55.65 to 59.23 knots. The performance on the 24th smashed it beyond all expectations though, a gloriously windy day that saw Sailrocket 2 deliver a 65.45 knot average.
It was a remarkable human achievement, piloting a boat down a 500m course at speeds that had previously been thought impossible. “Your job is to go 100% down that course, there’s no halfway about it,” Paul Larsen told me, almost a decade later. “By the time you’ve got a big team and all the momentum of that project going, your biggest fear is not going fast.”
The risks are inescapable though, as Larsen had revealed in a blog; “As I lay awake in bed that morning I considered writing a little note that I hoped would never be read and stashing it somewhere. Too morbid. Just get it right, Larsen.”
EXPONENTIAL GROWTH
To put Sailrocket’s performance into context you need to consider the trajectory of the outright sailing speed record. It started back in 1972 with Tim Colman and setting an opening mark of 26.30 knots. By 1993, had upped that all the way to 46.52 knots – an average improvement of almost a knot every year. But then something changes, progress halts for over a decade. The windsurfers and kiteboarders eventually start nudging it back up, but it’s 16 years before another yacht – Alain Thebault’s foil-borne – sets a new record, not even five.
