In pursuit of the outright world speed sailing record. No one said it would be easy…
If you’re intent on breaking the outright world speed sailing record, you’ll need a radical design – perhaps something on the lines of the Vestas SailRocket 2. But even then, as pilot and project leader Paul Larsen and his team soon discovered, breaking through the elusive 60-knot (111 km/h) barrier is far from plain sailing.
On the world stage, Namibia’s small coastal town of Walvis Bay borders on the insignificant – unless you’re a sailing fanatic who’s addicted to speed, that is. Thanks to the predominant south-easterly winds that blow off the Namibian coastline between the months of September and December each summer, it’s the ideal spot for sailors from around the globe looking for a stab at becoming the fastest man (or woman) under sail.
It comes as no surprise to learn that Larsen and his team are intimately acquainted with this part of the world. They last visited Walvis Bay in 2008 with their first design, the Vestas SailRocket (VSR) 1, which still holds the B class (up to 21,84 m² of sail) world speed sailing record of 87,72 km/h. Unfortunately, although they managed to hit peak speeds of 96 km/h on a number of occasions, the outright record remained frustratingly out of reach. (On their last run, just as things were looking promising, the boat became airborne, then flipped.) Dejected, everyone headed back to the drawing board, and so was born the VSR 2.
Read more about Vestas SailRocket 2 in the February 2012 issue of Popular Mechanics – on sale on 23 January.