Pretty Fly: How Ocean Racers Learned to Fly

A decade ago that scene did not exist in offshore racing. Today it is Tuesday afternoon in the IMOCA fleet. Foiling has gone from fairground trick to the default design language of the fastest boats on the ocean, though not, as we will see, of every boat. This is the first in a series on foiling for Offshore Online, Pretty Fly.

Here we set out where the technology came from and where it currently sits. In the future, we will unpack more of the foiling craze with naval architects, yacht owners and industry legends, who have actually designed these pretty machines.

How a Foil Works in a Nutshell

(Explained by a non-technical sailor a.k.a. not an engineer)

Foiling uses the same principles as airplane wings. The wing, in this instance the foil, is placed in the water, and as you’d imagine, water flows over the foil as your vessel moves forward. Push your boat speed fast enough and, like an aircraft wing, it generates lift. Enough lift, and it starts lifting the hull clear of the water surface. Less hull in the water means less wetted surface, means less drag, means the boat accelerates further, which generates more lift again. It is a feedback loop, and once a hull breaks free of it (the water), boat speed and apparent wind climb together in a way that never happens for a conventional displacement yacht.

The catch is that foiling yachts can behave like two or even three different boats.

An Archimedean mode, when the boat is completely in the water, it is a normal yacht, it is heavy, stable, forgiving and has lots of drag.

Skimming, when the boat is not completely flying, but still partly up on its foils.

And fully flying, up on the foils, no hull touching the water. The ride is twitchy, powerful, and changes all dynamics of sailtrim, steering and boat handling.

Learning to live between those states, and building a boat that performs across all those, is most of what modern offshore design in the foiling category is now about.

Flying Before It Was Cool

Hydrofoils are older than most people assume: the concept was first patented in 1869, the first powered hydrofoil craft ran in 1906, and the first sailing boat lifted onto foils in 1938.

The modern chapter starts in 1994, when French sailor Alain Thébault launched L’Hydroptère, a 60-foot foiling trimaran developed with naval architects VPLP. It took fifteen years of crashes and rebuilds, but in 2009 L’Hydroptère broke the 50-knot barrier, eventually touching 55.5 knots, a world sailing speed record that in its category still stands. It remains, by its own team’s account, one of the fastest ocean-going sailboats ever built.

The other seed was planted in a dinghy park. In the early 2000s British boatbuilder John Ilett built a working foil control system for the International Moth, and in 2005 Australian Rohan Veal became the first sailor to win the Moth World Championship on foils. Within a few years the fleet had converted, and the Moth became the proving ground where a generation, future America’s Cup helmsmen among them, learned to fly small boats before anyone tried it with big ones.

The America’s Cup Spark

The America’s Cup turned the trick mainstream. Foiling catamarans first contested the world’s oldest trophy off San Francisco in 2013, and the AC50s that followed in Bermuda in 2017 pushed the concept further.

Then came the real leap for offshore design. French naval architect Guillaume Verdier and British engineer Dan Bernasconi had, some years earlier, sketched a concept for a foiling monohull for a client who never built it. When Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa needed a new Cup class for 2021, they dusted off that concept and the AC75 was born: a 75-foot monohull with no keel at all, instead carrying twin canting T-foils loaded with ballast, capable of self-righting after a capsize and of flying at more than 50 knots. They raced first in Auckland in 2021, then in Barcelona in 2024, where Emirates Team New Zealand beat INEOS Britannia to become the first team to win three Cups in a row in the modern America’s Cup era.

Verdier is the master mind on which this whole foiling craze turns. The same design brain behind the AC75 was, at the same time, drawing IMOCA 60s for the Vendée Globe. Offshore racing did not discover foiling by accident. It borrowed the idea, and the designer, directly from the America’s Cup.

When the Vendée Globe Left the Water

IMOCA 60s had always been at experimental end of monohull design, home to canting keels and carbon wing masts long before foiling arrived. But 2016 is when everything changed. Six brand new VPLP/Verdier-designed boats lined up for that year’s Vendée Globe with hydrofoils fitted, alongside one older boat retrofitted with them. In reaching conditions, the foilers left their competitors in their dust, a startling gap in a sport measured in boat lengths.

By the 2020 edition the fleet had grown to nineteen foilers, and foil shapes had evolved fast, from straight daggerboard-style blades to curved C and Z sections designed for what one skipper called auto-stability, holding the boat at a steady flying height without constant intervention. It has not been without cost: earlier in that cycle, Kevin Escoffier’s previous IMOCA broke up and sank without warning, and three other competitors retired after collisions (with debris), incidents that fed directly into later safety rule changes.

The 2024/25 Vendée Globe, the tenth edition, showed how far the class had come. A record 40 boats started, and winner Charlie Dalin took MACIF Santé Prévoyance around the planet solo, non-stop, in 64 days, 19 hours and 22 minutes, smashing the previous record by more than nine days.

Records fell throughout the fleet along the way throughout different races, a 24-hour distance mark of 546.6 nautical miles set just three days in, broken repeatedly over the following weeks and eventually reaching 615.33 nautical miles The class’s own numbers tell the bigger story: average race speed has climbed from around 8 knots when the IMOCA era began in 1986 to roughly 17 knots today.

It is worth pausing here to note that Dalin sailed that record-breaking race while undergoing treatment for cancer. He sadly passed away in June 2026 in France alongside his family.

His 64-day record stands as the benchmark every future foiling IMOCA will be measured against. His momentous achievement will be remembered by all sailors passing through the Southern Ocean forever.

The Giants That Never Touch Down

If IMOCA’s foil (mainly skim), the Ultim class simply flies. These are fully foiling offshore trimarans up to 32 metres long and 23 metres wide, the largest race boats in ocean racing, and among the most extreme machines ever built for the open sea.

SVR-Lazartigue, launched in 2021 for François Gabart and designed by VPLP, covered 892.2 nautical miles in a 24-hour period on December 21, 2024, during an attempt for the Jules Verne Trophy. Averaging of 37.2 knots, with a peak speed over 50.

In February 2024, Charles Caudrelier sailed the trimaran Maxi Edmond de Rothschild (Gitana 17) solo around the world without stopping for repairs, the first person ever to circumnavigate alone in a fully foiling ocean-going multihull, during the inaugural Arkea Ultim Challenge.

These boats are also the sharpest illustration of foiling’s downside. Ultims are notoriously vulnerable to collision with debris, ice or marine life at speed, and capsizes, while rarer than in the class’s earlier years, still happen. The trimaran Prince de Bretagne flipped mid-Atlantic in a 2015 transatlantic race, its two crew safe but the boat written off for that event.

The Price of Speed

None of this comes free. Higher foiling speeds mean higher slamming loads, and there is a real question in the fleet about whether the boats are now faster than a human body can safely endure, autopilots already steer through conditions non-stop and injuries of falling crew members in a bad slam are common.

Foils themselves have proven fragile under load: the offshore design press has documented repeated foil failures in testing across both the IMOCA and America’s Cup fleets, and Alex Thomson’s Hugo Boss raced an entire Vendée Globe on a damaged foil after losing part of one early on. IMOCA 60s have been required to demonstrate self-righting capability since 2000, a rule written specifically to improve safety for those sailing these boats.

IMOCAs and Ultims Live in France, and We’re in Straya Mate?

True, the offshore foiling scene hasn’t fully made it to our corner of the world yet. But SailGP, America’s Cup and Moth classes are riddled with Aussies who have the know-how, skills and appetite, so who is to tell?

But right now foiling here looks different.

Michael Firmin’s CYCA-flagged Infiniti 52 Zeus runs a single retractable DSS foil, adding lift and righting moment on demand rather than chasing full flight, and just backed that up with a line honours and overall double at California Offshore Race Week’s Coastal Cup and smashing the Pacific Cup in the States.

Then there’s Wild Oats XI, the “winningest” yacht in Sydney Hobart Line Honours history, sold in 2025 to her own longtime skipper Mark Richards and his company Palm Beach Motor Yachts, rebuilt with naval architect Juan Kouyoumdjian, and rechristened Palm Beach XI. Fitted with radical new C-foils, she lifted clean off Sydney Harbour in February 2026 reaching nearly 30 knots of boat speed.

Two very different foils, two very different campaigns, both tapping into the same physics, with a different execution but both with winning in mind.

What’s the Point?

So what role is foiling actually playing in offshore sailing right now? At the top, it has clearly rewritten what’s possible: a Vendée Globe record smashed by nine days, a solo lap of the planet without stopping in a flying trimaran, a 100-foot supermaxi lifting her bow off Sydney Harbour and ripping close to 30 knots with just a jib and a reefed main. But that’s the top 0.5% of the fleet, boats with nearly unlimited budgets, naval architects on retainer and boat builders on standby.

What happens further down, in the programs that make up the rest of this sport is the real question. What technology will trickle down, when is it happening, and does it need to? Those are questions that we will try to answer in this story series: Pretty Fly.