Pretty Fly: Unpacking Foiling with Lincoln Dews

Instalment one covered the top 0.5% of the racing scene. Vendée Globe. Ultims. Budgets bigger than the GDP of some countries.

In this edition we wanted to focus on what the sailors think who are a part of the foiling niche.

So, we called up Lincoln Dews.

Meet Lincoln

Dews is the Australian, co-skipper and performance analyst for Swiss sailor Oliver Heer’s 2028 Vendée Globe campaign. He is also, by his own slightly nervous admission, the team’s reserve skipper.

Translation: if Heer can’t sail in the VG 28, Dews has to sail around the world solo, on a 60-foot boat that can average 30 knots.

“A bit of an ominous position to be in,” Dews says,which is one way to describe sticking your hand up to ‘fly’ solo around the planet on a boat.

We caught him on the dock in Newport, Rhode Island, a few days after crossing the Atlantic. The team’s IMOCA, Embrace The Challenge, was parked next to a rival campaign running something like twenty crew. Their own team runs on four or five.

Next challenge is racing from New York to Lorient. The race which started on 1 September and took the team straight back across the Atlantic to Lorient for the inaugural Ocean Race Atlantic, the first fully crewed shakedown for a Vendée Globe campaign which is still two years out.

Small Team, Big Machine

Worth standing still at the budget gap for a second, because it is a big part of this series.

IMOCA programs run on two to four-year funding cycles, and sponsors can vanish mid-build. Embrace The Challenge runs a lean team, whereas some of the newest boats on the same start line are backed by shore crews five times that size, plus hospitality professionals, simulators, the lot.

Dews isn’t bitter about it. “It’s kind of cool for me to see,” he says. Then, more bluntly: “It’s a business. You can’t go yachting unless you get the money.”

Same design rules. Same class. Wildly different bank balances.

How Lincoln Got Here

Dews did not come up through dinghies and work his way into bigger boats, the traditional route.

He has a physics degree, a background in navigation and electronics, and a habit of ending up in the technical seat. His first real IMOCA gig was in 2020, working shore-side on Clarisse Crémer’s build-up to the 2024 Vendée Globe. Officially, onshore navigator. Unofficially, boat’s systems specialist.

“These boats, before that, I didn’t really know a huge amount about, other than they were quite complicated,” he says. “For me they were always interesting, and I managed to fall into a role.”

The role kept growing because it had to.

IMOCAs are built for solo racing, which makes them genuinely dangerous to push hard at night with nobody watching. So, shore teams run what the French call a faux solo: two or three people aboard, one person actually sailing the boat for 24 hours straight while the others watch, measure and troubleshoot when needed.

Dews spent years in that second seat. Learning how the autopilot behaved under load. How the rig, keel and foils reported strain.

That kind of hands-on systems knowledge has become its own career path in the class, especially around autopilot tuning and structural loads. Dews got his first real race seat almost by accident: a phone call the night before the final leg of last year’s Ocean Race Europe, asking if he could jump aboard the Canadian entry to close it out.

Flying, But Not Really Flying

The class calls these boats semi-planing, semi-foiling. A deliberately unglamorous label, and Dews leans on it hard.

An IMOCA moves through three distinct states. Displacement mode, hull in the water like a normal yacht. Planing mode. And full flight, hull almost entirely clear of the surface.

How you sail it, and how it behaves, changes completely between the three.

“It’s important to remember these boats don’t fully foil,” he says. “Even so, once one is up and semi-flying or flying, it can out-run a 100-footer with fifteen crew hiked out on the rail.” And wouldn’t we all love to see that in a Hobart?

Sailors arriving from other classes, Volvo Ocean Race veterans included, tend to trip on the same thing first: the boat is sailed from an enclosed cockpit, watching instruments, not always exposed to wind and waves.

“Quite quickly it becomes a sailing boat,” Dews says. “We still slam when we sail upwind. A lot of the fundamentals are quite similar.”

But when conditions turn bad, being indoors changes the shape of the danger. Nobody outside is getting physically battered, so the boat keeps getting pushed. The class has picked up a real pattern of head injuries as a result, sailors thrown and landing wrong inside the hull.

That’s the toll this technology helped created. These boats reward being sailed harder than a human body wants to be, and the cockpit that makes 30-knot flight survivable also removes the feedback that would normally tell a crew to take the foot off the throttle.

The Loophole That is Changing the Class

Ask Dews what actually unlocked the current generation of IMOCA performance, and he skips straight past the foils or sail design.

He points at the rudders.

Class rules ban independently controlled rudders, an old safety rule. What they don’t ban is automatically adjusting the toe angle of both rudders together, while a sailor steers the boat.

*Toe angle is: Toe angle is the direction your rudders point relative to the centre line of the vessel when you look at them from above. You can angle both rudders slightly in (pointing towards the bow), straight, or out. Sound familiar? It’s basically the same trick Formula 1 pulled a few years back that helped Lewis Hamilton win his 7th world title. Mercedes found a way to adjust front tyre toe through the steering column, sharpening turn-in without technically steering the wheels independently.

Sound familiar? It’s basically the same trick Formula 1 pulled a few years back that helped Lewis Hamilton win his 7th world title. Mercedes found a way to adjust front tyre toe through the steering column, sharpening turn-in without technically steering the wheels independently.

IMOCA teams found their own version. Nobody’s especially proud of how blatant the workaround is, and nobody’s giving it up either.

Charal (now the boat Dews co-skippers) launched first with the system, years ago, and struggled to get it reliable. Flashes of real speed, never consistent.

The current crop, sharing a mould and a common Antoine Koch design between Thomas Ruyant, Boris Herrmann’s Malizia and Banque Populaire, are all launching with a refined version of the same rudder logic. The results? In one word, spectacular.

“How they do that is still very secret, and everyone will have developed a slightly different system” Dews says, even between teams sharing a hull.

Hand-Steering Is Back

Here’s the twist: this loophole has actually pushed sailors back onto the wheel.

A decade or so ago, the class went from self-driven to almost entirely autopilot-flown, as speeds climbed and conditions got too violent to hold a helm outside. Autopilot did the flying. Humans adjusted, trimmed and navigated.

Over roughly the last two years, since fully crewed racing under The Ocean Race banner put more sailors back on the wheel under pressure, that’s reversed. Hand-driving is creeping back into more conditions, not fewer.

Partly that’s about squeezing the last few percent of VMG out of a gust or a wave that an autopilot would smooth straight through.

Partly it’s an engineering story of its own. Fly-by-wire steering, still with force feedback so the wheel feels real, means the physical load a sailor fights has come down, even as boat speeds have gone up.

“It’s a bit of an engineering feat to be able to hand-steer the boat again,” Dews says.

The Keel Isn’t a Keel Anymore

If the rudders are the class’s open secret, the keel is its most counter-intuitive tool.

On a normal yacht, canting the keel to windward is about righting moment. Using weight to fight heel. Simple enough.

On an IMOCA, past roughly 15 knots of boat speed, the keel is doing something else entirely. It’s an active flight control surface, adjusted constantly to manage ride height, built with up to seven degrees of cant, so that even sailing flat, it’s generating lift rather than fighting it.

Push the cant harder and the boat goes faster. Right up until it drops off the foil, at which point the same setting becomes a handicap.

Sailors now drive with a remote control for the keel strapped to their wrist, adjusting it in real time alongside the helm. It’s the single biggest trim tool on the boat.

It’s less like steering a yacht and more like flying a plane on multiple control surfaces at once.

Three Sails, Not Fourteen

Dews reckons the longevity engineering behind that, getting more shapes and more miles out of fewer sails, is one of the more exportable pieces of tech to come out of the class. Furling systems and semi-rigid battens are already migrating elsewhere.

What Actually Trickles Down

This is the question the whole series exists to answer. Dews’s answer isn’t the one most people expect.

It isn’t the hull lifting clear of the water that filters down to the rest of the sport. It’s everything holding that moment together.

Autopilots that can fly a boat through three different modes. Rudder and keel logic built to manage righting moment, not just steer. Structural engineering good enough that fleet retirement rates have roughly halved over eight years, even as boats have gotten faster and harder-driven. Collision avoidance, currently an AI camera, AIS and radar rather than lidar, because a solo sailor asleep at 30 knots in the dark needs the boat itself to notice what’s ahead.

“I think refining sail crossover will be a massive one,” Dews says. He points specifically at sail technology. Furling headsails, semi-rigid battens, durability engineering forced on IMOCA sailmakers by sheer mileage, all of it is already moving into other parts of the sport.

It’s a more useful answer than “foiling is coming for everyone.” It’s also a more honest one.

Full flight on a 60-foot offshore boat needs a keel generating serious lift, foils sized and placed within a tight class box, an autopilot flying three modes, and a sailor willing to hand-steer at 30 knots in the dark. None of that is landing in a cruising fleet any time soon.

What might land: everything that makes flight manageable and repeatable once you’re doing it. The sensors. The load management. The collision avoidance. Sails engineered to take a beating and keep performing.

What’s Next on the program

Embrace The Challenge left New York on 1 September, racing back across the Atlantic to Lorient in the Ocean Race Atlantic. A brand-new race, built specifically to shake down 2028 Vendée Globe campaigns before they go solo.

It’s Dews’s first race on the boat since the team took delivery three months ago. Four-handed, against a fleet spanning several generations of design. Brand-new hulls next to boats like this one, an older platform running the newest generation of foils.

After that, a programme built almost entirely around miles. Six transatlantics between now and the next Vendée Globe. An Around the World race starting in January. And Dews, somewhere between co-skipper and reserve skipper, learning to sail a boat solo that he insists he never actually planned to.

Next up in Pretty Fly

We’ll sit down with the naval architects actually drawing and helping produce boats, and ask the same question from the other side of the table. What, if anything, are they designing for the rest of us?