Project Speedbird: Interview with Hannah White and Dave Chisholm
by Mark Jardine 2 Jun 2015 16:13 BST
2 June 2015
Dave Chisholm at the launch of Project Speedbird © Mark Jardine
Hannah White and Dave Chisholm launched Project Speedbird at the Science Museum on Wednesday night. We caught up with the team to discuss the challenge to make Hannah the first female sailor to break the 40 knot barrier.
Mark Jardine: I'm here with Dave Chisholm and Hannah White at the launch of Project Speedbird at the Science Museum in London. I guess with the boat built, this is a project that has really just begun. Dave, what's the next step?
Dave Chisholm: The next step Mark is to take the boat to pieces again, take all the lacquer off it that we've put on to make it look beautiful for the Science Museum and then the real work starts; Get it sailing, get some time on the water, just like any new boat or dinghy. Find out what problems we've got with it, fix them, repeat, repeat, repeat and learn as much as we can about the boat.
While that's all going on we're really lucky that Land Rover, our technical partners, are going to be helping us develop the foils. We'll run it on Moth foils to start with, make sure the platform is stiff and the rig's working and then we'll start manufacturing our own foil packs and start testing those. I reckon by August / September time we should be starting to look at what Speedbird will really be about, the best foil package, the stiffest platform, some nice sails which North Sails and potentially Dave Dobrijevic at Dynamic Sails is going to help us develop. Then, like with a dinghy, we'll start to look at doing some events, but for us those events are finding a good day to send the boat down the track and see what speed she'll do.
Mark: Hannah, you've been practicing in the foiling Moth so far, how are you finding the time with your other commitments to get the practice in and how will you find the time to get out on Speedbird?
Hannah White: Well it hasn't been easy to be brutally honest, but my absolute priority is sailing... for the first time in my life, which seems ironic as I've technically been a sailor for quite a long time. This is such a steep learning curve and I'm only just at the very beginning of that curve - I can just about sail a Moth and that is definitely not good enough to be record breaking in terms of skill, but I've certainly got the desire to do it. I'm out on the water at the moment 4 or 5 times a week, so getting in as much as I possibly can. Despite being a control freak I've managed to delegate quite a lot of the rest of the project in terms of commercial, PR and other things to the team at Captive Minds and we're really lucky to have their support. I'm really approaching this as if it were an Olympic campaign rather than some PR stunt and I've historically been quite good at the latter and not very good at the former so this is definitely turning things on their head. With Dave's guidance through that I'm definitely taking a different approach to it and my sailing is better than it has ever been in my life, so it's clearly paying off but I've got a long way to go.
Mark: Will you be taking the boat around with the Extreme Sailing Series to sail at the events?
Hannah: Both the Moth and Speedbird will be at some of the Extreme Sailing Series events, especially where they have a keen sailing market so, for example, the boat's coming to Cardiff in a few weeks time, we'll definitely be taking it to Australia at the end of the year and we're also going to Hamburg with it. The rest are to be decided at the moment, but we're also looking at other markets that don't have an Extreme Sailing Series event which are big markets for Land Rover, for example Korea who are desperate to have an ESS event but Singapore have that covered in Asia, but we could go there as a nice, good solution to tick their sailing box and give them a bit of a flavour of what we do without taking the whole roadshow of the Extreme Sailing Series.
Mark: Dave, it's quite clear with the design you've gone with, you've based it on the Moth, you've elongated it and created a stable platform. It is really just a case of developing from this point everything underneath the boat and on top of the boat?
Dave: We've started with a platform that is very Moth-like but, because no-one's done this before, we think that it'll be just like developing a Moth but who knows what problems we'll uncover. The Moth is a brilliant boat, but it is limited by the Moth rules; 11 feet long, 7'4" wide, 80 square feet sail - the same rules since 1910 or whenever it is. So it's an amazing package and an amazing boat, but we don't have to be that width, we don't have to be symmetric, we don't have to have the foils set up in the platform space so that the boat will go upwind - we're not interested in going upwind really - and so I think to say it's just like a big Moth and we're just going to develop it from there is a bit under-selling it really. This is a really specific boat, I reckon by the time we've finished it we'll only really sail within a 10 or 15 degree angle. It will limp around upwind and it will have a stub wing on the other side so that we can sail it back and forth but at the end of the day we've got massive respect for Paul and the Sailrocket guys, but you didn't ever see that going upwind and no-one ever complained about that and it had to be towed back to the other end by a RIB, so the precedent is set - we build a boat that will go as fast as it can in one direction and we pull the trigger and that's the fun of it in many ways.
Mark: Hannah, when you get out in Speedbird, what is the thing that you're most looking forward to on your first sail on the boat?
Hannah: The thing I'm most looking forward to about Speedbird is, first of all seeing all the hard work come to fruition and see how my sailing and my development in sailing through the Moth and Dave's coaching and my hundreds of hours on the water on the Moth has paid dividends, so that I'm actually in a position to not perform in Speedbird, but at least try and tame the beast. Dave has worked tirelessly on building this extraordinary boat and I absolutely have to do that justice and I'm really looking forward to rising to that challenge.
Mark: Well the best of luck to both of you, I think it's a fantastic project and I really hope you continue and build the speeds towards the record. Thank you both for your time.
Dave & Hannah: Thanks Mark.
www.projectspeedbird.com