Foiling WASZPS

WORDS: JONO RANKINE | IMAGES: ROB PARTRIDGE

he WASZP class has taken off at Middle Island! Over the past 12 months, the class has grown from 3 to 15 privately owned WASZPS now kept at the club. The class is not only popular with our 15 to 19 year old youth Shark Sailors but also with adults who are looking to get into some fast, exciting sailing.

The popularity of the class isn’t something that’s unique to Hong Kong. There have now been over 950 boats sold across 43 different countries around the world, with the latest European championships attracting over 100 sailors.

The WASZP has a perfect mix of modern, fast, and foiling boat which is hugely popular at the moment combined with a relatively low cost and simplicity. So far the fastest recorded speed is 27.6 knots. Enough to get the adrenalin going, while you fly a meter above the water on a boat barely 3 meters long!

The components are more robust than most foiling boats and the class is one design, so there isn’t the constant need to keep buying upgrades to stay competitive as you have to with most other foiling development classes at the moment.

These boats will start foiling in 7 knots of wind. This is helped by the fact that the boats have comparatively large one design foils, which slightly limit the top speed but help significantly at getting the boat out of the water and foiling at lower wind speeds and making it easier to ‘foil tack’ when sailing upwind. From the beginning of March we have setup regular Shark Weekend and School holiday coaching which is open to any of the sailors who own boats here. Our Shark WASZP sailors are also given the opportunity to sail with the 420 and 29er teams when we aren’t running WASZP coaching, to strengthen those teams as well.

Once all of our WASZP owners are up to speed with learning to sail the boats around a course, we are looking forward to seeing them all regularly racing in Hong Kong as well as overseas in the near future.