@@TheStuartstardust Any kind of sailing needs some wind. I sailed around the world when I was younger. When the wind dies you either just drift slowly until the wind picks up again or you run the motor if you have one. Most often though you just wait for the wind to pick up again as you'll have a limited amount of fuel to burn even if you have a motor. We mostly ran the engine just to charge our batteries and run the refrigerator/freezer. We only used the engine to move if we really had to.
@@JustInvertedFpv Intersting point of a kite is that it has access to potentially a lot more wind, particularly higher up. And as we know wind tends to be stronger higher, too. These days most cruisers have a lot of solar panels to power electrical house loads.
Automated kite sailing for commercial shipping is the field to launch this amazing asset to the general sailing community. God speed to kite-sailing it is my love! ! !
@@FullCircleTravis there is always one isn't there. The original comment was that the person did not know why kites weren't used more on sailing boats. I think I made my point.
About twenty years ago I thought about doing something very similar. I told quite a few people and they thought I was crazy lol. No there are several different types of kite boat. Looking forward to seeing how these evolve in the future
I can't believe I'm the first to comment. This guy is a legend! Well done my friend I hope the future is bright for you and the world catches up with how amazing this is. Way to make your own luck Francisco!
I sold mine a couple years ago. It was military surplus, but it was serviced properly, and worked great. Wish I could remember the brand name, but they are fairly common. In good used condition, they sell for $200-350.
I’m here for this comment. Nice. Have searched through the second hand ones. A cheap insurance yes but after the conversion rate and freight. I might have to try a different hobby
Kites are by far the best sails out there atm. You get sails in 100 meter height. And a little kite sail got more effective square meters to catch the wind than one might think. Cause it is able to move around. So more Wind Energy by area is harvested. You could even use a kite ship as an Electricity Generator. If you combine it with a water turbine.
Actually traditional yacht's have a sail not dissimilar to a kite called spinnaker sails, they are often diploid in races along with "goose winging" your other sails particularly when running with the wind.
starofdavid, I click only because the smartest man i've Ever met used that term, " we have only scratched the surface". There is immeasurably more we don't know, than do know. ☆
Could there be a foiling version, or is the speed differential between foiling and not foiling too great for seamanship and /or the kite (large kite needed to get up on foils, then too large to handle when up?)
Be nice to see some vetted polars on a kite setup like this in order to have actual facts to discuss. Anyone have a good source for them, they seem hard to find at this point?
Be interesting if it could be made into a small portable deck mounted back up unit for conventional yachts, in case of demasting, just a small kite and control unit that you can pull out from storage and bolt on and plug in to limp you to the nearest port!
Yes but it takes a lot of calibration if you swap kites and increase line. Not impossible but probably easier run from a lap top and steered from a mono line with a controlled steering head.
this is amazing. i was wondering why someone hadn't done this solo yet. a million sheep are rowing across the atlantic like transatlantic slaves, but no one kited across. it's the creative thoughtful and ambitious people that blaze the new path and the rest slowly that follow. that said, i'm still not convinced kiting for small boats will get popular until some sort of auto-sailer can be made reliably for kites. everything of the past 10 years says that autosailers do exist , yes, but they are very expensive , not reliable let alone standardizeable in the near future, and quite likely dangerous for small boats as opposed to larger ones. kites might simply be exposed to excessively high wind loads and wind variance at higher altitutde. the flips side of the attraction..... to want all that power. but can you handle it!? looks like francisco did. but he's not your average sailor.... in my mind i was thinking perhaps the solution to automating kite sailing is a lighter than air bouyant kite ( patents exists) that also has powered small drone style propellers on it powered by cables running up the kite lines. the propellers simply ensure the kite is being pulled in the proper direction ( forget steering by line) ---and the bouyancy ensures the kite is always floating at a consistent point regardless of its prior operating position. it seems the continuous swooping of the kites is part of the dynamic instability which makes them able to sweep so much wind and get so much power, but also makes them prone to unstable control accidents. one way to remedy this is to make them slow and dumb by inflating them with a bouyant gas. but then that creates new problems.....eh.
Modern Kites are a miracle of precision crafting and computer design and lots of research trial and error. The sport of Kitesurfing has led us to these miracles of technology. YOU Zeev need to get a lesson flying kites with your local kitesurfer to understand the dynamic of the kites. You sound like me before I knew about it, very clever but not understanding certain things only lessons and familiarization with the equipment can give you ~
In 1995 in Canarias, while we were preparing our family ketch for our Atlantic crossing, sailor Nicole Van De Kerchove (intentionally) demasted her JOD 24 and set her with kites (simply controlled by JOD's genoa winches). Beyond performance, Nicole's idea was to promote kites as emergency devices for (unintentionally) demasted yachts. I don't know if there has been other solo ocean passages powered by kites
Hmm, it seems like his boat must go really fast, there is the bit where he lost the mid size sails and is having to make do with the 7m one and only(!) going 12 knots! but the total distance from lisbon to martinique is 3200 nm, which in 25 days is only a 128 mile average. That's only 5.34 knots average speed. Which is good, but a fast monohull could do that! I really want to watch a much longer video that showed all the trials and tribulations of this crossing. 3 minutes is just not enough to answer all my questions
Why don't we ever see anyone stacking multiple kites on the same line? Of course I've opened myself up to all of the know it all's on TH-cam with this question. Please only answer if you really do know it all.
They used to do this back in the 19th century, for meterological observations, before they switched to using balloons. The best strength/weight ratio line they had was steel wire. They could fly kites up to 30,000 feet apparently! but they couldn't fly one kite up there on it's own, because the line would break under it's own weight. So, they'd put a train of kites up, the second one holding supporting the line for the first, the third supporting the line for the second etc... Now days we have much stronger materials such as UHMWPE, and people have successfully flown a single line kite that high! But you are probably thinking about having a line of traction kites so that you can reef the sail by landing some etc (somewhat like a cutter rig). That I don't know. Maybe just because it's more complicated and the need has not arisen because most people arn't crazy enough to kite across an ocean!
@@dominictarrsailing That's not real far off of my thinking actually. The idea I've had for over a decade consists of reducing a rig down to the absolute minimum. So there would be a foil in the water, a fairing for the rope until it comes out of the water, and a stack of hang gliders on the other end. The pilot would control the direction of foil travel from way up in the stack of hang gliders but the foil would regulate its own depth. Electricity to move the foil control surfaces would be from a small turbine. Electricity for the electronics in the hang gliders would be made from some solar panels. I think a person in this rig could beat the trans-atlantic crossing record by a factor of 2x.
@@carsonc1272 how do you figure 2x? hmm, current record is Banque Populaire V 3d15h25m45s, average speed 32.94 knots. to double that you'd need to go about 66 knots. That would mean going about the same speed as Vestas Sailrocket 2's record, the whole way across the Atlantic. I guess one advantage of being able to sail very very fast is it greatly reduces the uncertainty in choosing the weather window. You'd just need strong winds in the correct direction for 2 days. VS2's speed is limited because the downfoil starts to cavitate, so you really need a drastically different design to go faster than that. There are teams currently working on building on what VS2 achived, and hope to go 80 knots. They are still planning to have the pod containing the human(s) (lets call it the cockpit) skim on the surface, which isn't as cool as suspending it from the kite. That is fine for a drag race on a carefully chosen course with flat water and strong winds, but would probably be too bumpy in real ocean conditions! however what you are proposing is basically how VS2 works, but just get rid of all the fuselage boat crap that's gonna hit the waves and slow you down. So I think 2x is crazy, yet reasonable.
Challenging adventure, great job....I have a 34 foot trawler with fly. do you think we could handle Atlantic crossing with wing it... What would be the challenges
If your trawler is high sea worthy, and since the Atlantic crossing in the trades is mainly downwind, you might consider the kites as a nice fuel saving system the days of plain downwind (or close to) Don't forget you have no fin keel, no daggerboard... so no upwind, not even beam reach. And of course have enough fuel, just in case...
I’m a singlehanded sailor. No way would I attempt the kite boat. It would be like juggling pissed off cats. I bow to the master. Great job!!!
In principle, kite flying can be (and has been) automated. In practice, it may yet not be stable enough for long term use.
lol truly amazing definitely a young man's game
@@LoanwordEggcorn ..but it always needs some wind, don't know if it's a problem in the big ocean..🧐🤓🤔
But nice with automatic while cruising 😎
@@TheStuartstardust Any kind of sailing needs some wind. I sailed around the world when I was younger. When the wind dies you either just drift slowly until the wind picks up again or you run the motor if you have one. Most often though you just wait for the wind to pick up again as you'll have a limited amount of fuel to burn even if you have a motor. We mostly ran the engine just to charge our batteries and run the refrigerator/freezer. We only used the engine to move if we really had to.
@@JustInvertedFpv Intersting point of a kite is that it has access to potentially a lot more wind, particularly higher up. And as we know wind tends to be stronger higher, too.
These days most cruisers have a lot of solar panels to power electrical house loads.
A brilliant achievement which deserved much more recognition than it got. Belated congratulations!👏
Automated kite sailing for commercial shipping is the field to launch this amazing asset to the general sailing community. God speed to kite-sailing it is my love! ! !
How is this not more popular. This is like the new sailing
$$$$$$ and complicated.
with a foiling boat he'd be across in a couple of days!!
Kites on a boat do not allow you to sail towards the wind, this makes them of limited use unless you are on a trade wind route going one way.
@Neil Broome
You can sail into the wind with a kite. Not as efficiently.
@@FullCircleTravis there is always one isn't there. The original comment was that the person did not know why kites weren't used more on sailing boats. I think I made my point.
That auto kite control is amazing!
…agreed! Lotta high tech stuff in there eh.
About twenty years ago I thought about doing something very similar. I told quite a few people and they thought I was crazy lol. No there are several different types of kite boat. Looking forward to seeing how these evolve in the future
I can't believe I'm the first to comment. This guy is a legend! Well done my friend I hope the future is bright for you and the world catches up with how amazing this is. Way to make your own luck Francisco!
That hand pump water maker is pretty cool. It's probably too expensive, but wouldn't it be neat to include one with every life raft?
I sold mine a couple years ago.
It was military surplus, but it was serviced properly, and worked great.
Wish I could remember the brand name, but they are fairly common.
In good used condition, they sell for $200-350.
@@dalesmth1 Well that's a very affordable piece of insurance then.
It's the well known Survivor 35 by Katadyn. It had been around for decades. It might be around 2500 € brand new.
I’m here for this comment. Nice. Have searched through the second hand ones. A cheap insurance yes but after the conversion rate and freight. I might have to try a different hobby
Boy that control system doesn’t look complicated at all
Kites are by far the best sails out there atm.
You get sails in 100 meter height.
And a little kite sail got more effective square meters to catch the wind than one might think.
Cause it is able to move around.
So more Wind Energy by area is harvested.
You could even use a kite ship as an Electricity Generator. If you combine it with a water turbine.
It doesn't even have to be combined with a water turbine, it can be on land. Check out kitepower for example :)
Actually traditional yacht's have a sail not dissimilar to a kite called spinnaker sails, they are often diploid in races along with "goose winging" your other sails particularly when running with the wind.
We have only scratched the surface regarding wind,wave and solar power. I see the future being bountiful and very environmentally friendly.
starofdavid,
I click only because the smartest man i've Ever met used that term, " we have only scratched the surface".
There is immeasurably more we don't know, than do know. ☆
This is so cool, I learned to sail a kite before a boat, it must be a different world to sail like this
Outstanding! Well done.
Outstanding!!!! Great adventure, amazing skills and courage - freakin brilliant stuff 🙏🙏🙏🌏
I dreamed about this so many years ago and it’s like seeing my dream come true
The speed is amazing for a boat that small. Well done. Would love to know more about the boat and its capabilities
Could there be a foiling version, or is the speed differential between foiling and not foiling too great for seamanship and /or the kite (large kite needed to get up on foils, then too large to handle when up?)
Well done mate. 👏
Fantastic. Top man 👏👏👏👏
Great job incredible achievement!
well done, great achievement
Dude thats craziest idea crossing Atlantic with this...man you saved 1000 bucks on airplane ticket good job
Whoosh!
this needs biiiiig currage...........very impressive, pushing willpower to new levals, GREAT
Meus parabens pelo excelente video, desde o Brasil !
Be nice to see some vetted polars on a kite setup like this in order to have actual facts to discuss. Anyone have a good source for them, they seem hard to find at this point?
Where is a full video on that?
Seems like a pretty risky thing to do, so many things could go south really fast !
Good luck !!!
Wow reallye innovative!
Amazing!!!
Awesome!
Francisco great achievment. How long did it take? It would be a Portuguese to do this first!
Amazing well done
Great effort
Can it tack against the wind
1:20 That's a juvenille Leatherback turtle. Rare.
Fantastic ,somewhere, sometime they will fuse kites, foils and auto ride control to create a new kind of sailing cargo carrier😅😅
Amazing! Did you have radar and autopilot for night? Glad you made a safe trip 🎉
Be interesting if it could be made into a small portable deck mounted back up unit for conventional yachts, in case of demasting, just a small kite and control unit that you can pull out from storage and bolt on and plug in to limp you to the nearest port!
Can the boat sail itself and adjust course and kites while unattended?
What about using the kinetic energy of the waves to create some kind of force to propel the boat?
how much is an automatic kite system ?
Whaou
La pêche le marin volant
Bravo
I can see this in my 1985 EDELCAT33. Stable platform, how much current are you drawing from the servo motors?
WOW. Respect!
Exactly - how can this not be more popular. Why are kites not also used instead of a spinnaker on normal sail boats?
How often does the kite go down? Or does it?
Sailing! Take it to the next level & strap a few big kites on a cruise ship…keeping it green!
Multihull tekneler için, tekneye kuvvet uyguladığı nokta itibariyle, multihull tekneler için yelkenden çok daha güvenli ve verimle görünüyor. 👌
This seems to be far more efficient than sails, and it avoids the heeling over.
Wait'll somebuddy mentions hydrofoils to Francisco ... lift hulls above water and hull surface friction drag drops 800x% from water to air .. ;)
An no more water in the battery compartment.
How is water getting in?
How high (into the wind) can you go with a kite?
Can this "kite sail" be applied to a motor yacht?
Kevin Costner use this technique in waterworld
Amazing
Can we install that on a velomobile?
What brand name is that water maker ?
Turtle be like, hey guy sweet kite. How about you hook me up with one.
Very cool
Wow!!!!!❤❤❤❤
I imagine a kite upsized to pull a container ship in ideal wind conditions. Why not?
Small boat for an ocean crossing respect guess you had some scary moments outs there?
Wow! Very impressive. Did you have to do much upwind sailing? What was your course? How long did your voyage take? Hats off to you!
No gas needed?
Is there no way of getting the kite flying on an auto pilot system?
Yes but it takes a lot of calibration if you swap kites and increase line. Not impossible but probably easier run from a lap top and steered from a mono line with a controlled steering head.
does anyone know what brand that water maker is?
Survivor 35 by Katadyn
@@joeldumas5861 ty ty ill look into this
@@joeldumas5861 wow its 2700 dollars
This setup can go faster than wind DOWNWIND, in theory!
Price of the system?
1.000.000 $$$$
Stack your sails if you want more power. Easy as RW (relative work)
this is amazing. i was wondering why someone hadn't done this solo yet.
a million sheep are rowing across the atlantic like transatlantic slaves, but no one kited across. it's the creative thoughtful and ambitious people that blaze the new path and the rest slowly that follow.
that said, i'm still not convinced kiting for small boats will get popular until some sort of auto-sailer can be made reliably for kites. everything of the past 10 years says that autosailers do exist , yes, but they are very expensive , not reliable let alone standardizeable in the near future, and quite likely dangerous for small boats as opposed to larger ones. kites might simply be exposed to excessively high wind loads and wind variance at higher altitutde. the flips side of the attraction..... to want all that power.
but can you handle it!?
looks like francisco did. but he's not your average sailor....
in my mind i was thinking perhaps the solution to automating kite sailing is a lighter than air bouyant kite ( patents exists) that also has powered small drone style propellers on it powered by cables running up the kite lines. the propellers simply ensure the kite is being pulled in the proper direction ( forget steering by line) ---and the bouyancy ensures the kite is always floating at a consistent point regardless of its prior operating position.
it seems the continuous swooping of the kites is part of the dynamic instability which makes them able to sweep so much wind and get so much power, but also makes them prone to unstable control accidents. one way to remedy this is to make them slow and dumb by inflating them with a bouyant gas. but then that creates new problems.....eh.
Agree. Every design has pros and cons, and better automation and more development are needed to make kite power more widespread.
Modern Kites are a miracle of precision crafting and computer design and lots of research trial and error. The sport of Kitesurfing has led us to these miracles of technology. YOU Zeev need to get a lesson flying kites with your local kitesurfer to understand the dynamic of the kites. You sound like me before I knew about it, very clever but not understanding certain things only lessons and familiarization with the equipment can give you ~
In 1995 in Canarias, while we were preparing our family ketch for our Atlantic crossing, sailor Nicole Van De Kerchove (intentionally) demasted her JOD 24 and set her with kites (simply controlled by JOD's genoa winches).
Beyond performance, Nicole's idea was to promote kites as emergency devices for (unintentionally) demasted yachts.
I don't know if there has been other solo ocean passages powered by kites
Hmm, it seems like his boat must go really fast, there is the bit where he lost the mid size sails and is having to make do with the 7m one and only(!) going 12 knots! but the total distance from lisbon to martinique is 3200 nm, which in 25 days is only a 128 mile average. That's only 5.34 knots average speed. Which is good, but a fast monohull could do that!
I really want to watch a much longer video that showed all the trials and tribulations of this crossing. 3 minutes is just not enough to answer all my questions
They are trying to use this technique on big cargo ships.
Why don't we ever see anyone stacking multiple kites on the same line? Of course I've opened myself up to all of the know it all's on TH-cam with this question. Please only answer if you really do know it all.
They used to do this back in the 19th century, for meterological observations, before they switched to using balloons. The best strength/weight ratio line they had was steel wire. They could fly kites up to 30,000 feet apparently! but they couldn't fly one kite up there on it's own, because the line would break under it's own weight. So, they'd put a train of kites up, the second one holding supporting the line for the first, the third supporting the line for the second etc... Now days we have much stronger materials such as UHMWPE, and people have successfully flown a single line kite that high!
But you are probably thinking about having a line of traction kites so that you can reef the sail by landing some etc (somewhat like a cutter rig). That I don't know. Maybe just because it's more complicated and the need has not arisen because most people arn't crazy enough to kite across an ocean!
@@dominictarrsailing 30k feet is pretty impressive.
@@carsonc1272 forget this trade wind sailing, you could be sailing in the jet stream!
@@dominictarrsailing That's not real far off of my thinking actually. The idea I've had for over a decade consists of reducing a rig down to the absolute minimum. So there would be a foil in the water, a fairing for the rope until it comes out of the water, and a stack of hang gliders on the other end. The pilot would control the direction of foil travel from way up in the stack of hang gliders but the foil would regulate its own depth. Electricity to move the foil control surfaces would be from a small turbine. Electricity for the electronics in the hang gliders would be made from some solar panels. I think a person in this rig could beat the trans-atlantic crossing record by a factor of 2x.
@@carsonc1272 how do you figure 2x? hmm, current record is Banque Populaire V 3d15h25m45s, average speed 32.94 knots. to double that you'd need to go about 66 knots. That would mean going about the same speed as Vestas Sailrocket 2's record, the whole way across the Atlantic. I guess one advantage of being able to sail very very fast is it greatly reduces the uncertainty in choosing the weather window. You'd just need strong winds in the correct direction for 2 days. VS2's speed is limited because the downfoil starts to cavitate, so you really need a drastically different design to go faster than that. There are teams currently working on building on what VS2 achived, and hope to go 80 knots. They are still planning to have the pod containing the human(s) (lets call it the cockpit) skim on the surface, which isn't as cool as suspending it from the kite. That is fine for a drag race on a carefully chosen course with flat water and strong winds, but would probably be too bumpy in real ocean conditions! however what you are proposing is basically how VS2 works, but just get rid of all the fuselage boat crap that's gonna hit the waves and slow you down. So I think 2x is crazy, yet reasonable.
Les voiles de kitesurf sont l'avenir des voiliers rapides.
Imagine Battle of Trafalgar with kite-driven ships of the line (pun intended).
incrivel.
Challenging adventure, great job....I have a 34 foot trawler with fly. do you think we could handle Atlantic crossing with wing it... What would be the challenges
How would you tack with a kite?
If your trawler is high sea worthy, and since the Atlantic crossing in the trades is mainly downwind, you might consider the kites as a nice fuel saving system the days of plain downwind (or close to)
Don't forget you have no fin keel, no daggerboard... so no upwind, not even beam reach.
And of course have enough fuel, just in case...
F’ ing cool !!!
Never even heard of such a thing.
❤👌👌👌
Cray cray....
Top
Not a kite board ....thats a tri hull
The only good shot of the whole boat was covered by the next video thumbnail!!!😡😡😡 watched the whole video just to see it!!!
Why not just put a helium balloon on the kite ? Anyhow for in trade wind sailing.
OK. So now go back with the same system and we'll talk back
“There have been some problems with water” - not a good spot to make that observation…
Everything old is new again. I daresay Columbus would have a comment or two.
Привяжись к судну, а то докатаешься.
music ruined it
impractical as hell
Hey, is the pronounciation of the meter not standardized? You say meater, we say mater. Why is that? There is no meat in meter, there isn't.
GET RID OF THAT SHITTY NOISE (MUSIC)
So why did he do this?
Has he really nothing better to do?
Very sad.
yeah, like he'd be so much better off sitting on a couch watching YT videos😂
@@cpobyrne1 Are people not supposed to watch You Tube videos?
Presumably you haven't?
Who would have thought. Not you, obviously.
Why did you comment? Nothing better to do? So sad!
@@skyak4493 Well it is wasted on you.
Why did you comment?
That’s Blooper