Gunboat G4 with UptiP Foils

In my understanding its a bad excuse by the Gunboat owner, Corley. Complaining the risky sailing of a racing team for the own bankrupcy isnt't of honesty.

Instead: he could have made some very postive side effects out of the capsitzing if his company used it positively in the tone like: "look at the foiling G4, its our 'laboratory' for safely cruising cats". But nothing I have noticed like this.

All sailors and potential buysers who followed the G4 with interests have this mentality of risk taking. Its in their blood. - No one who can afford such expensive racing boat is a coward who likes "coffee sailing"; such guys and the potential buyers are the white sharks in the pool of sardines (symbolically spoken) having companies or being in higher management positions of bigger concers. These guys know to take risks, and they love it as it gives them the kick of being alive and potential.

All the "coffee sailors" who like these "living room" kind Cruising Cats cant be the market and target group of Gunboat. It would be like to build Ferrari Formula 1 Racing cars and then offering boring family vans in "Ferrari Red". That doesnt go hand in hand and wont work. The single brand i remember which had been successfully doing such kind of "image transfer" was Honda.

I still see different mistakes in a well balanced marketing strategy, uncontrolled boat building process in China and a chaotic structure of supporters. - As you say, the whole boat was designed by the Dutch guys of HP. So why should I order a boat, being sold under "American Flag", built cheaply in China which comes originally from Netherlands ? Disturbing...

Anyhow... the US law gives the chance to keep going. E.g. in Germany bankrupcy would mean the end of the company. In consequences it needed to sell the corporation to a new owner who pumps in fresh capital.

 

To be fair I don't think there was ever any intention for the G4 to be built anywhere other than the Netherlands by HP.

The Chinese build issues were on one of their earlier models the Gunboat 60.

 

"No one who can afford such expensive racing boat is a coward who likes "coffee sailing"; such guys and the potential buyers are the white sharks in the pool of sardines (symbolically spoken) having companies or being in higher management positions of bigger concers. These guys know to take risks, and they love it as it gives them the kick of being alive and potential."

Actually most guys who could afford such boats are buying J/Boats, X Yachts and other conventional fixed-keel ORC/IRC boats if they are racing at all. There's not much "Gunboat style" risk there.

I was checking some earlier G4 info and saw some hype claiming that it was proof that foiling was now mainstream. It's an odd thing to claim that one boat represented mainstream acceptance and it shows just what a beatup has been going on.

Foiling is fun, but the continued failure to achieve what the hype claims is demonstrated by the difference between the numbers of foiling boats that are out there regularly sailing (say 400 cats, mostly converted As, and 650 Moths, and that's probably generous) and the vast amounts of money that have been spent on them directly or indirectly. Even ignoring the enormous amounts that went indirectly into promoting foilers via the smallest AC for decades, we've had two corporate collapses from foiler manufacturers. Both of them hit small-time tradies with real rents to pay and real bills coming in. I once did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that indicated that each sailing foiler represented a $10,000 net loss of investor capital, which is not sustainable for very long. The success of the Mach 2 would have started to turn that around but the collapse of Gunboat may have messed it up again, even ignoring the huge effective subsidy from the AC.

Foilers are great, but the emphasis on them could be pretty bad for sailing - after all, the boom sports of today are simple ones like stand up paddleboarding and kayaking, and there is no sign of the boost in the sport that some promised we would see with the arrival of these new boats. Even back in the 1800s, when boats were laboriously hand-built by small companies and individual tradesmen, successful new types of boat grew as fast as foilers have done in this industrialised age - and in more recent times the major developments in the sport have grown up to 100 times faster than foiling.

 

The Foiling Revolution

===================
That is ridiculous. The foiling revolution is making great progress every year with this year being the first time a company has introduced a self-righting keelboat foiler designed specifically to be easy to sail (Q 23) but it won't even be in production until 2016. And the first year a cruiser-racer foiler has been introduced-the G4. Up until this year the only choices for foilers were out and out race boats- when it is the easy to sail, smaller boats and cruiser racers that are likely to have a much larger share of the market. Just in the last two weeks a design team from Argentina has proposed(and is building) a dinghy foiler(with movable ballast) inspired by a 57 year old man who wants the thrill of foiling in a more docile boat that can be foiled or sailed normally. It's innovation like this and the many more like it still to come that will allow foiling to continue to grow and reach a much wider market. Another example of a foiler designed specifically to appeal to a wider market is the new Waszp by one of the best builders of the Moth foiler -the fastest boat under 20 or 25 or 30'!
The boat is designed to be much easier to sail than the Moth(although it's legally a Moth as well) and to cost about half as much when in goes into production in 2016. This is the kind of innovation that all the foiling excitement has inspired and these types of boats will be the most significant part of the on-going revolution.
The G4 is a great boat and I'm sure it will continue to be built and sold to people who like the idea of a little comfort with their state of the art foiler.
--
Another example of a foiler designed to be able to offer comfort to its crew in addition to the joys of foiling is the soon to be produced Exocet 19 trimaran-the very first under 20' trimaran foiler-probably being produced early next year. See the "small trimarans under 20'" thread for more.
http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/multihulls/small-trimarans-under-20-a-43650-38.html

 

Doug, foiling is fun. however people are claiming that foiling is now "mainstream" and 'the future of sailing". The reality is that in a major sailing nation like the UK (which is one of only two nations with a fleet of 50 active racing foiling boats*) only 0.008 (or less) of sailors at national level are on foilers, and about one in a thousand regular sailors are on foilers. In normal language, activities that attract only about one in a thousand of those who do a sport are rarely called "mainstream".

The "foiling revolution" is, in reality rather than hype, making much slower progress in terms of popularity than other new forms of sailing. There were something like 200,000 windsurfers afloat when windsurfing was old as modern foiling. When kitesurfing was about as old as modern foiling, it claimed 1.5 MILLION sailors. When the Laser was new, they were selling over 1000 boats each month - I don't think 1000 foiling sailboats have been sold in history. Even back in the 1800s, sailing canoes were being built faster than foilers are being built today. In the first decade of "beach cats", one class alone in just one country (the Shearwater in the UK) grew faster than the entire sector of foiling sailboats seems to have grown across the world. I'd bet that "sailyaks" like the Hobie Adventure series is out-selling foilers by a long way. The RS Aero alone is probably out-selling all the foiling sailboats together.

All of the above types faced issues like the ones that foilers do - but none of them started off so slowly. Foiling is probably the slowest-growing significant sector of the sport in history, despite the fact that in many ways it's easier to switch from "mainstream" sailing to foiling than it was to switch to windsurfing or kiting.

Since all of the above types grew much faster than foiling, yet not one of them became "the future" of the sport and not one of them even became the most popular branch of the sport, there is no reason to think that foiling will ever become 'the future'.

Foiling is fun, and if it was promoted as a wonderful minority interest in sailing many of us would cheer it on. It's a different thing when it is presented as 'the mainstream' and "the future". If foiling is the future, then the sport probably doesn't really have a future since it won't have critical mass.

And to repeat - none of this says that foiling isn't great. It's like canoe sailing, shorthanded offshore multi racing or wavejumping - a wonderful niche activity, but not "the future' and not even really mainstream.


* or maybe three, if the US now has 50 foiling A Class. Either way, only a minute proportion of the world's sailing nations have medium-size foiler fleets.

 

The Foiling Revolution

The key part of the foiling revolution has not even begun to show what it can do! And that is the new foilers where the focus is fun and comfort rather than just speed. Every foiler produced before June of 2015 has been a racing machine and that is just one of the many facets of foiling fun. The new boats I described earlier ,among many others, will bring the thrill of flying above the water to a much wider audience.
And rather than "hype" the excitement associated with foiling is genuine excitement that is gripping the world now with new boats and new ways to enjoy foiling about to be available to everyone. No more will you have to be an athlete to enjoy foiling-the experience will open up to thousands of new people in boats never thought possible until now.
Yes, it is a revolution.......

 

You've been talking up the people's foiler for years now, and it's still not here.

If you want fun and comfort then why foil?

 

Stay tuned.....

 

G4

From Holland Composites:

As builder and designer of the G4, Holland Composites / DNA wants to state that we are sorry about the latest developments at GB, and also feel sorry for all people involved.
We are confident Gunboat will come back stronger and more focused then ever .
Concerning the G4 project : this is not affected by the situation as Holland Composites is a independent company running the design and build for the G4 .
Holland Composites continues developing,building and marketing the G4 with Gunboat as we ever did .
The second boat is hitting the water soon, with all the improvements based on the experience racing and (off shore ) cruising the boat the last year.
It will be safer, faster and easier to foil. The first computer assisted foiling boat available!(emphasis DL)


All the best to the Gunboat team !

 

In summer I was in contact with a guy who was involved scientifically in the "foil development and research process" of HC for the G4. It looked like that they wanted just do the "prototyping" in Netherlands... and they had the hope, then bringing the G4 to USA for boat shows that they can find enough potential buyers and investors to start a regular production. I suppose then this "small series" would have been produced in China, too.

But with the capsizing I think they had learnt that its more complicated and that they needed a "computer assisted system" which they now are building with launch of 2nd G4 at 40 foot size in March 2016. A Hobby sailor cannot handle such a foil racing mashine manually, too dangerous.

I suppose even G4 No. 2 we have to see as a kind of "prototyping". Maybe it needs another 2-3 boats till this model is ready for a series production and the "cruising sailor". Only there HC can earn money with this boat.

 

Skip,

Again complete hog wash. The G4 was always planed to be in serial production at HC. And hull #2 is launching in a few months not 2017.

 

That are basically 3 people. All of them know production of 6+ boats per year would take place in the modified facilities of HoCo, as the G4 is basically a product of Holland Composites in design, build, and development.

 

Keep cool, man !! If you are the guy with the glas bowl looking into HC's future, be happy. I just can repeat, what I got told.

2017 was just a "typing devil". As everybody can read on HC's facebook page its March 2016. 6 hours ago HC officially gave its declaration on their FB page with following photos, see attachments:

So keep cool, Mr. Advocat !! Maybe you like this rude tone of respectlessness and denunciation using as verbal technique front court for your customers as attorney. You miss any objectivity it more sounds like a pleading the way you are talking. - But here in this forum it's just chit-chat talking about "plastic boat" and rich man's "big toys". Everybody has the right of free speech and express what he/she thinks, loudly. - Nothing more it is. - We have much bigger problems in this world to become heavily emotionally and upset.

 

Always When i read a weired post like that One above,
i See an inkompetent, angry misleaded man pulling out his Right leg , using it as Axe, destroying the table/Platform he was sitting at.

And yes, the World has it's Problems, but One of us has bigger Problems.

pogo

 

G4

This may have already been posted here, but just in case here it is again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpeu0ic1xgE