The need for speed
Angus Grogono As a child, I spent my summer holidays camped out on Weymouth beach during Weymouth Speed Week watching what looked like big toys being thrown into the big bathwater. While my father and my uncles performed miraculous repair jobs on their hydrofoil-borne catamaran, Icarus, through the night, I drifted off to sleep dreaming of hulls and sails, longing to be old enough to join in.
Inspired by the popularity of the America's Cup, since 1972 Weymouth Speed Week has been drawing inventors from their sheds down to the exposed flatwater nursery that is Weymouth harbour in an attempt to break the world speedsailing record. The speed is measured on a 500m straight one-way course with a 'flying start'. The highest average speed on a 500m course has since then become accepted as the sailing speed record worldwide. There are no restrictions on the design of the boat, other than that it shall be propelled only by the wind and that at least one crew shall be on board, and that the boat shall sail on liquid water (not ice).
Speed-sailing is a very attractive sport for spectators because the racing usually takes place near land, and each race is finished in just 20 seconds. It is particularly exciting for me because as a child I watched my father and his brother sail Icarus to victory in '76, '77, '80, '81, '83 and '85.
Weymouth Speed Week has now basically become a battle between athletes (on windsurfs) and the engineers (designing ever weirder boats). So far, the athletes have the edge. The wind-powered speed record has been held by a windsurfer for ten of the past 20 years (and is held by one now), but Professor Potts is not far behind, which you can tell because the sea is populated with more and more counter-intuitively designed vessels, which the long arm of engineering has wrenched from Nature and distorted. A present contender for the title resembles a cross between a pond-skater and an aircraft wing. The pilots of this boat are cocooned in one of the pondskater's feet, in a capsule made out of plywood — a material chosen to minimise the damage if it suddenly explodes under the extreme pressures involved.
Cross-breeds between the surfing and engineering camps may look great but they don't go very fast. Windsurfers on hydrofoils ride a foot above the water, looking as if they are running on rails just beneath the surface. Very cool, but likely to break more bones than records. Attaching kites to surfboards has spawned a generation of airborne beach-bums and a gruesome new chapter in sailing injuries (kite-surfers tend to smash at high speed into the balconies of beachfront hotels). But the point is the adrenaline and the cred, not how fast it is.
I'll be there at this year's Speed Week, at the Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy from Monday 1 October to Sunday 7 October. And once again, I'll be cheering on my father, who has decided to mark his 70th birthday by launching a single-handed assault on the world record from his windsurf.
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