Some experiences from Dave Carlson

I first sailed my Dad's homebuilt catboat around a long anchorline at age 4 in Michigan, and remained with these slow cranky craft for years until seeing my first P-cat in Hawaii in the early 60's. Also obvious were the big, fast, brightly-colored beach cats of Woody Brown, handled by unfriendly Hawaiian beachboys. Woody actually gave me a free ride on a glider demo day at the North Shore airport. I saw a newly-invented Hobie 14 in 1969, but did not get a ride on it despite my desperate appeal, so I took my new Ph.D. in Chemistry to Florida. We flew our homebuilt Rogallo wing kite behind my ski boat for 3 summers without damaging anyone, until getting into catamarans, the best sailing craft for Florida beaches. After 25 years of racing cats, I began to hear stories of sailing foilers, sailed a Hobie trifoiler, raced against the Bradfield NF2 and other creations, sailed a Bradfield Hydrosail 16 kit boat at the Florida Institute of Technology, then happened upon Dave Keiper's Hydrofoiling webpages. This led to Dave Keiper visiting my home in Florida in late 1997, and many fun but frustrating days with the DAK foil boat, after Keiper asked me to do his engineering and development work. This is covered in my article in the Multihulls Magazine article (Summer 1999), "Foiling with One of the Giants".

Sadly, Dave passed away in 1998 without seeing any more than lots of e-mails from me and photos of the foiler, as he never made it back to Florida. I've been carrying on ever since with at least 46 hydrofoiling days, zipping over the top of Florida waters under sail. They work fairly well, but if I can keep Tom Speer interested, perhaps there will be improvements to the foils and the rigs. Sailing foilers seems to be a repopularized subject for speculation, home building and kits. I think it is because of the vast number of inexpensive suitable platforms for foiling universally, meaning that there are many fast, tough, proven beach cats sitting unused, moldering away as bird roosts out behind the barn. Lets get them foiling!

Oh dear this got much too long! I didn't get to the part about "Sailing a beach cat is like cantering on a horse, but the foiler Kangalope in a breeze, is like galloping a tall thoroughbred race horse at top speed! What a rush!"

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