Namibia – Formerly the fastest sailboat in the world, SailRocket is making her final attempts at the outright speed sailing record this month, trying to steal the title from the big hydrofoil sailboat l’Hydroptere. One of these attempts ended in a dramatic boat crash today, catapulting the little boat and her skipper into the air in a stunning flip, while the support team watched in horror from the sidelines.
This isn’t the first time the Sailrocket has crashed dramatically and although the SailRocket team had an amazing season last year, they have also dealt with many set-backs. After this remarkable boat reached 47.36 knots to become the fastest sailboat over 500 meters, the team had to deal with the repercussions of the major crashes that sometime result from riding the razor’s edge – one of which put the boat’s skipper Paul Larsen in the hospital.
After all the hard work, the team were absolutely supportive earlier this year (but must have been at least a bit disappointed) when Simon McKeon on Macquaire Innovation announced that he had snatched the sailing record from SailRocket with a speed of 50.07 knots. Macquarie Innovations‘s title was short lived however, as the much larger boat Hydroptere recently blasted the record to become not only the fastest sailboat in the world over 500 meters and one mile, but the fastest watercraft of any kind under sail, beating kiteboarder Alecandre’s Caizergurs’s world record of 50.57 knots. So, when the SailRocket team returned to Namibia, saying it would be for the boat’s last record runs, they were itching to grab that outright speed sailing record for themselves, and they expected to be skirting the edge of disaster.
