SAILDRONE — W
e arrived at Saildrone right at lunchtime. About 15 employees, many of them wearing khaki Carhartt overalls, gathered at picnic tables outside the front entrance. Beyond the façades of the old warehouses that once made up Naval Airstation Alameda, a few hulking gray Navy ships sit at dock. People eat and chat happily as the South Bay stretches out into blurriness behind them. A few of the doors and awnings of the Saildrone warehouse are shaded in the same "hunter" or neon orange as the sail drones themselves. This collection of old military-industrial warehouses has been repurposed for a modern Bay Area economy, which includes several distilleries, a winery and a brewery. With the addition of the ultra-modern, techdriven Saildrone, the neighborhood feels a little chic and trendy. This was the third time we'd been to Saildrone in the last year, and there's an undeniable vibe here. We won't try to explain or qualify it, there's just a vibe. This place is just . . . cool. We were met by Sebastien de Halleux, Saildrone's chief operating officer, who offered us lunch — a large, delicious, premade salad. As we sat down to eat, we noticed a name on the container: Richard Jenkins, the founder and CEO
of Saildrone. If you don't know the story, Jenkins set the land speed sailing record in 2009, hitting just over 126 miles per hour in a winged craft, and cementing his place in history. The green, rigid wing from Greenbird, the record-breaking land yacht, sits against a wall in the warehouse. (And we apparently hijacked Richard's salad.) Saildrone draws a straight and clear line between Jenkins's accomplishment and what the company has become. "Saildrone's patented wing technology was born from 10 years of [research and development] in pursuit of the landspeed record. The quest for speed and control led to the innovation of a precise but low-power wing system." Today, Saildrone makes what are called Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), which sail all corners of the globe collecting vast amounts of data, but do so far more cost-effectively compared to traditional research models such as large ships. A for-profit company, Saildrone launches and manages various research missions across the world for governments or private companies, and delivers data in "realtime via satellite" to clients. The drones have sailed over 200,000 miles in the last several years, and one new sail drone is being built every day. Richard reportedly said he wants to have 1,000 drones on the water within the next three to four years. As we eat lunch, a woman stops by the
LATITUDE / TIM
Sebastien de Halleux shows us an older generation of well-traveled sail drones that were built with outriggers (new generations are without).
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LATITUDE / JOHN
"What if you put data and put technology toward the service of humanity?"
Saildrone founder and CEO Richard Jenkins at the Alameda headquarters.
table and exchanges a few happy, singsongy words in French with Sebastien. We feel that thing again, a, ahem, joie de vivre. "There's like, a vibe here, right?" we asked Sebastien. He laughed. "Saildrone is unlike any other company. Everyone that works here is passionate. What's so special about sail drones is that they're able to deliver the abundance of instruments anywhere in the world — under sail power." The visceral passion at Saildrone is most obvious in Sebastien himself, who speaks about everything with gusto and an almost boyish enthusiasm. "I think sailing is art," he exclaims. "The way you trim your sails, the way you angle yourself to the wind." Sebastien says he doesn't come from a sailing background, but his recent résumé is impressive: After taking sailing classes, he did his first Pacific Cup in 2012, and was listed as the skipper of Swazik, a Swan 45, which was the winning team that year. It's an accolade that Sebastien is humble to admit. "It's a perpetual trophy, so my name is, like, on there with Stan Honey's!" He did another
