SailRocket Sails–“It works, it bloody well works!”: Those are the exuberant words of multihull maestro Paul Larsen, after he finally got his spindly, oddball design into the water and sailing. Larsen hopes to tune the thing up and blast through the 50 knot speed barrier, setting a new world record and snapping up speed sailing’s Holy Grail of Holy Grails. Larsen and his team spent three days testing the thing, and had to devote the entire first day simply to learning how to tow the damn thing. After some adjustments they mastered this basic art by Day 2 and went sailing in lightish winds. And SailRocket didn’t fall apart. It didn’t sink. It actually powered along at about 15 knots. Here’s Larsen’s report:

“SAILROCKET was very responsive to the helm like any light boat should be and I could sail her upwind and downwind with ease. With a bit of a gust she was off but there was an alarming amount of spray coming off the front planing surface. The outboard end was lifting as we knew it should and the pod was doing its job.The boat was nose down and it was obvious that the back was lifting first and this was preventing t e nose from having the correct angle so she just stayed buried. I was surprised how quick she was going considering this and had the feeling that if she lifted that she would have really taken off. All this was in only 12 knots of wind. We didn’t expect the boat to lift until we had 16 knots…All day the MOTHS [pictured last Friday in TWC] were flying around us on their hydrofoils teasing us to come out and play. They were all eager to burn off SAILROCKET. I was laughing to myself thinking, ‘Mate, when this thing lifts its skirts I could take out half your fleet in one pass like a bloody great carbon scythe, hydrofoils or no hydrofoils.’ They were having a ball.”

Click here to get the full skinny on this bizarre beast. They’ve got a lot of development work to get even close to the sailing speed record of 46.52 knots, much less the big Five Oh. But they’re having a great time and the boat is pretty damn intriguing…



Larsen Eats Spray: “Glub..It..Gack…Works…Choke…I think…”