Speed sailing

The craft used vary from single sailor windsurfers or kitesurfers, to multi-hulls with crews of fifteen people.

The design is based on experience from a range of hydrofoil sailcraft that Thébault built in cooperation with the late Eric Tabarly since the 1990s.

The Yellow Pages Endeavour, a highly optimized one-way proa design using a rigid wingsail lost its decade old 1993 500m record to a windsurfer in 2004.

In 2009, in a radical shift away from the tiny surfboard based craft, the trimaran Hydroptère, with a length of 18.28 meters and a displacement of 6.5 metric tons, took the 500m speed record back for the D class boats.

The previous record of 48.7 knots (90,19 km/h) was held by Finian Maynard, an Irish born windsurfer who sails for the British Virgin Islands who achieved this speed on 10 April 2005 on the same purpose-built canal.

Zara Davis holds the outright nautical mile record for a woman, set in Walvis Bay Namibia, an open water venue, in November 2006.

For example, in October 2008 the yacht Ericsson 4 officially travelled 596.6 nautical miles in 24 hours, establishing a 24-hour monohull record.

Skipper Torben Grael and his crew made the record on the first leg of the 2008-2009 Volvo Ocean Race.

He then signs a performance increase of between 30 and 40% compared to the record to be broken by Loïck Peyron 5 years earlier.