GOING DOWN

An old shipwreck ​story from my schooner bumming days, it is told here to reach across the years with some perspective of classic seafaring in deep, heavy monohulls relative to the contemporary — even futuristic — lightweight vessels.

My digital assistant, CRISTI (Can’t Read It So Tell It) knows that I can edit her out when she interrupts the Caper, but privately she really beat me up over this one because it runs 43 minutes. Of course you always have the pause button, or just click on the X, but if you get through this monologue, you may take away some notion of how far we’ve come with marine architecture in the last 50 or 60 years.

And now we’re getting pretty close to the “perfect boat,” one that cannot sink, and is also self-recovering from capsize. Foil-borne, too? Foil-assisted? We’ll see. But the Hybrid Wing is, in my view, destined to become endemic — if for no other reason than its buoyancy can prevent multihulls from turning turtle. What’s your view?

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Click here to listen to this podcast episode.