Thanksgiving week was tough, but the holidays will be sweet for three young Bay Area sailors who survived grueling tryouts in November to become San Francisco’s entry in the Red Bull Youth America’s Cup in September.
The three are part of a crew called American Youth Sailing Force that made it through the team selection trials in which six teams competed – nearly 40 sailors ages 19 to 24. They furiously cranked winches, tripped through agility drills and  … More
The latest bid for the outright World Speed Sailing record has been launched. Since Wednesday the French and American kiteboarders, Alex Caizergues and Rob Douglas, have been performing a series of 500-metre runs in the ‘Volkswagen Transporter Arena’, a surf spot situated at the heart of the Salins du Midi in France’s Camargue. Rob Douglas, the current holder of the World kitesurf speed record (55.65 knots achieved in 2010), second of all the categories behind Paul Larsen’s Sailrocket 2, has so far pulled off a timed sprint of 53.40. Alex Caizergues, the first man to exceed 100km/hr (54.10 knots in 2010), has achieved 52.45 knots.
This is excellent news because it means that the Franco-American duo, among the top speed kitesurfers on the planet, have over recent days validated the brand new spot in Salin-de-Giraud  … More
24th of November,2012. This is the day that VESTAS Sailrocket 2 took speed sailing into a whole new era. Having already broken the existing Outright world speed sailing record by the biggest margin in the records history a little over a week earlier, the team took to the waters of Walvis Bay in strong winds to try and be the first to take the sport over the 60 knot average mark.
This video shows the third run of the day. The record attempt had been plagued by unusually light winds but they knew that on this day, Walvis Bay was going to deliver the goods. After 11 years of hard work on a ‘roller coaster of highs and lows’… everything was in place for something big to happen. Founder and co-designer of the Sailrocket project, Malcolm Barnsley, had flown in to see his dream play out before his own eyes. VESTAS Sailrocket 2 has put a mark way up on the graph to show everyone what is possible.
NEWS FLASH – The outright world speed sailing record was smashed this afternoon (November 24) by Paul Larsen in the Vestas Sailrocket 2 with the astonishing time of 65.37 knots. (75.23 mph – 121.06 km/h). See Paul’s blog for the very latest as it happens.
The below article was posted just a few hours before the latest new record was run and has not been changed.
In a spectacular week for sailing, more than a dozen world speed sailing records have been broken at two different venues in Namibia. The outright speed sailing records for both 500 meters (59.38 knots) and one nautical mile (55.32 kts) were set in Walvis Bay by Australian Paul Larsen and the British-designed, inclined-rig hydrofoil Vestas SailRocket 2. Simultaneously, 600 km away, the annual Luderitz Speed Challenge has seen nine world outright speed records for sailboards established in just a week, including … More