Dutch Olympic sailor Kalle Coster and Sailmon are aiming to do for performance sailing what Steve Jobs and Apple did for the ‘mobile telephone’

In four short years Sailmon have evolved from ambitious start-up to serious contender and are gaining traction as a go-to solution for processing and displaying data onboard. Right across the sport, from François Gabart (Macif) to Nathan Outteridge (Artemis), key players are using the products in increasing numbers.

Kalle believes the reason for the company’s fast rise is simple: ‘We are born sailors, it’s in our blood and Sailmon is the natural expression of that. We work to help bring sailing into the 21st century and share it with the wider world.’

The company’s mantra – ‘designed by sailors for sailors’ – rings especially true for Kalle. The son of double Olympian Dick Coster, Kalle has won medals at world cups, world and European championships and has held the no1 ranking in the Men’s 470. ‘The only medal we missed out on was an Olympic one, though we came painfully close!

‘Dirk “Cheese” de Ridder told me to learn a second skill. I’ve always been interested in tech so becoming a navigator seemed logical. I quickly realised products out there were difficult to use, hard to calibrate even for full-time sailors. The tech was dated and clunky and there were no off-the-shelf solutions for dinghies, coach boats and sportboats.

‘In 2014 we saw an opportunity to not only challenge but beat the players who have dominated the market for far too long. I’m inspired by SpaceX, Tesla, Strava and Apple, so I knew it could be done better, made easier and more accessible.’

Kalle has many business idols and, when setting up Sailmon, he had in mind the words of Steve Jobs: ‘Build a great team. A handful of AAA people can create big things.’ So now Richard Kent manages the customer service, Enno Romkema who brings 30 years of experience leads the development team of four and Kalle’s sister Kim runs the firm as CEO. Serial entrepreneur Peter Houtzagers is non-executive director and has provided the bulk of the company’s funding to date.

Main picture: it’s a long way north to go to confirm the readability of onboard instrument displays in unusual light – but if a job’s worth doing… These Sailmon displays on the Oyster 885 cruising yacht Firebird remain crisp, crystal clear and bright in full sunlight, even when viewed through polarised sunglasses. The nonreflective screens give a ‘soft light’ display which minimises damage to night vision even on the blackest of nights. All the graphics are 100 per cent customisable. Very neat and tidy onboard processor (below)

‘Our true eureka moment was when we realised we could make the user interface far easier while taking over control of all sailing data, calibration and third-party displays,’ said Kalle.

And so what started as multi- purpose displays, milled out of blocks of aluminium and marinegrade anodised, quickly evolved into industrial-quality, waterproof, optically bonded displays driven by the Sailmon E4 processor. The E4 is the mind of any onboard system. It integrates with Expedition software, is easily set up using the NavDesk app on a smart device and is third-party compatible.

In four years the company has smashed the sailboat data status quo by understanding the market, delivering real innovation, sticking to clear business principles and drawing inspiration from a handful of disruptor heroes. So what’s next?

‘The most exciting product we’re working on is an online platform for viewing, logging and replaying sailing performance data, as well as content shared from boats. Another cool product is an app that will convert any smartphone into a pocket E4 processor, allowing every sailor, in dinghies to superyachts, to have some form of telemetry and wind angles on their boat. After sailing they will be able to look at this data and analyse their trip or race. It will have all available data in the interface photos and videos taken during the trip. Once this is done the opportunities for this platform are endless.

‘Then there are the E4 Black and White processors. The White, with its lower price, fewer ports (just Ethernet and NMEA2000), cloud functionality and data gathering, is perfect for smaller boats, cruisers and weekend warriors.

‘The E4 Black is geared towards superyachts and racing yachts. It features external channels and our “parallel universe” platform, which allows all our processors to record raw sensor data. This raw data can then be played back to the processor, for it to be recalibrated, creating new “cooked data” that can be compared with existing cooked data. This allows people to gather data across wind ranges and send it to a professional calibrator who will then send back a calibration file. Eventually we aim to automate this.

‘In 10 years’ time sailing will have changed. On the sport side there will be a lot of fast foiling boats and these will want to look at key variables. Tech firms like Apple and Samsung will have waterproof, sunlight-readable smart devices. AR will be widely used for navigation and mark finding and VR for debriefing and following boats live.’

It’s been said that the big fish eat the little ones, but in the case of Sailmon the opposite might yet prove to be true…

Click here for more information on Sailmon »

Sailing is fortunate to have so many really smart and interesting people working away to pull off little bits of technical magic that, often unnoticed, play a disproportionate part in the success of the best programmes…

Nearly all of us have spent time playing with rigging to find optimal solutions for our boat, whether it’s a dinghy, a keelboat, offshore racer or even a cruiser. Ambitious performance sailors hate inefficiency, friction and failure, while we love clever, elegant solutions that make us believe we are getting every possible bit of power to make us go fast and safe through the water.

Located at the heart of the precision engineering hub of central Italy UBI Maior Italia share this passion – they have the tools, the skills and, most importantly, the creativity and inspiration to try new solutions to the age-old fight against inefficiency in marine hardware. And being a relatively small operation makes them ideally suited to custom and semi-custom design and fabrication, where standard products may not be quite good enough to achieve the desired elegance in design and function.

The process starts in the first meeting with the customer, whether it’s a naval architect, designer, boatbuilder, sailmaker, rigger or project manager, by defining the problem that needs solving. In these first discussions sketches are made and parameters are defined, and usually standard products are first considered for their suitability. For UBI Maior these represent proven designs that have met the needs for numerous other customers and fit within production quality and cost criteria.

However, if a standard part does not meet needs then further discussion identifies whether an existing standard product can be modified or an entirely new part will be needed. Options are discussed for the part’s design, material choices, timelines and the estimated costs. Sailing experience among the technical staff helps advise the clients on the right choices among these options.

Once the part has been built and installed UBI stay with the project through sea trials and even beyond to ensure additional modifications are not needed. And even though custom parts do not carry warranties, as standard parts do, this is an automatic value-added policy at UBI Maior to ensure the customer is completely satisfied – setting the firm apart in their field.

‘I always say that we are not just suppliers of deck equipment, but a partner in the project,’ says sales manager Fabio De Simoni. ‘During the first commercial approach of certain projects I never try to sell blocks, but to offer our workshop as a partner. Like other guys employed in the company, I sail a lot on different types of boats and I speak and listen to all the professionals around me – sailors, builders, riggers and sailmakers – to accumulate experience so that I may have a first answer to every problem our customers explain to us.

‘Our biggest advantage is that the operating chain for us is very short and the information between the salesmen, technical office and production team circulates very rapidly in every phase. We do not follow a linear flow pattern that goes in one direction. Every “actor” in the process may continue to participate, using feedback from the others to avoid getting to the assembly phase with an error.

‘Every customer, large or small, receives helpful explanations and information. We always try to be depositaries of our experiences and give notations collected from our projects, standard or custom.’

UBI Maior’s special alchemy – balancing strong customer attention, innovation and quality with consistency and reliability at a good value – stems from the fact that, though a relatively new brand, their workshop and the people who run it have been working for over 50 years for other leading companies in mechanics, biomedical engineering, as well as fashion and other fields.

‘Our company is organised in floors,’ explains De Simoni. ‘We have a commercial division on the first floor where all staff have technical backgrounds. Then we have a technical office on the second floor, which is able to work in numerous digital formats, from pdf documents to the 2D and 3D CAD files we use in production. This office provides information and technical materials and filters design information as well as working with the designs themselves.

‘The third floor is where pure design takes place and where all UBI products and future company projects are conceived. This is where our engineers create designs using SolidWorks and a whole series of applications like Ansys, SolidWorks Motion, OpenFOAM or Fluent. We also have two test benches, one internal and one at an external certification agency, to independently confirm the results.

‘The fourth floor is production, where we have three and five-axis CNC machines plus turning machines and super-specialised machinists to operate them.’

Experts in assembly and testing have their own small independent workshop for adjustment and finishing – this department also deals with repairs and analysis of any problems with parts and pieces.

‘In a world governed by Amazon, we know the importance of fast delivery times,’ says De Simoni. So the final floor is the warehouse with all the lines of standard products organised on independent shelves for efficient distribution.

UBI Maior Italia’s success has led to so many project enquiries that they have had to learn to say ‘no’ when timelines or other constraints cannot meet their standards. But they are quickly adapting, having created a new infrastructure to meet the challenge of handling more business without compromising their strong bonds with customers. ‘We want to be able to remain smart,’ says De Simoni, ‘as in the early days, and as only a small company can. We want to be able to offer this type of service.’

Among the interesting projects currently underway is one with Hervé Penfornis of Dimension Yacht Engineering and Laura Cappelletti, at Italian shipyard Vismara Marine, for the construction of the new Nacira 69 designed by Seahorse contributors Axel De Beaufort and Guillaume Verdier.

Above: discrete titanium ‘tulip’ sheaves with very high-strength X-bearings carry the gennaker sheets on Tango. The line speed on these performance superyachts, combined with the loads, are enough to burn out anything that is remotely under engineered.
Below: aluminium this time, pig noses for the bowsprit on new TP52 Luna Rossa.
Bottom: custom fittings for the 3:1 reduction on the J2 and J3 headstays on the Imoca 60 No Way Back, again all in titanium

‘Our yard is very focused on aesthetic detail,’ says Cappelletti. ‘UBI Maior Italia provided this for us in our last two projects when we asked the guys to machine mooring cleats, hinges and closures of the hatches in black anodised aluminium like all the rest of the equipment, pulpits and extensions.

‘This boat has a thousand custom solutions for everything, from the pig nose to the different furling line inlets and jib sheet inlets, and every type of fairlead, furler, sheave box and crossovers to the last titanium block of the runners will be made by us,’ says De Simoni. ‘All the custom parts have been envisioned and designed by Hervé and Laura then submitted to us for our analysis on making them more efficient or sometimes simply cheaper to machine.’

This is not the first collaboration UBI Maior have had with Vismara – a similar project with this yard was the build of the Mills-designed Super Nikka 62.

Mylius is another shipyard that now collaborates on all of their models with UBI Maior. Currently they are committed to building their latest 76ft racer-cruiser for the yard’s owner, who will race the boat on next year’s Maxi circuit. ‘The high technical level combined with the maximum guaranteed quality make UBI Maior Italia an important partner for us,’ says Valentina Gandini of Mylius. ‘For almost every boat we have to find new solutions and these guys are a great help.’

On top of these complex projects there is the steady flow of business from industry professionals, such as riggers and sailmakers. ‘These marine professionals seek not only clever design, but maximum reliability,’ says De Simoni. ‘They want a contact person who is always present when managing orders. And if there is a problem they need a solution quickly that will please the customer.’

Grand prix projects always mean long hours and crazy numbers just to save a few grammes. ‘But these are among the most interesting challenges, finding new solutions to optimise manoeuvres and make them more efficient,’ says De Simoni. ‘Retriever systems for gennakers are an example. Lately we’ve tried to hide every bit of equipment under the deck so as not to hinder the movements of the crew and the displacement of sails. If you look at the deck of a modern racer you cannot see anything – on TP52s even the staysail furlers have disappeared below deck.’

For Antoine Mermod, who is project managing a new Imoca 60 for the next Vendée Globe, UBI Maior were perfect, enabling the team to push all the limits… while remaining reliable. ‘UBI helped us design and machine virtually every detail onboard – titanium blocks, the pig nose of the bowsprit, all the fittings for furler management, every fairlead and soft padeye… always working like maniacs to save every gramme!’

Click here for more information on UBI Maior Italia »

One thing that can be sobering about developing products hand in hand with the world’s highest-profile professional sailors is in the final analysis they actually have to go out and use what they have put their name to…

‘When you’ve absolutely, positively got to stay dry and warm, accept no substitutes. Musto HPX is the very best there is.’ So might that straight-shooting film star Samuel L Jackson say if he were to play an offshore sailor in a movie. And he’d be right, except Musto’s MPX range does a pretty good job too. MPX is one substitute that even Vendée Globe and Volvo Ocean Race veteran Sam Davies accepts, and in some cases prefers. ‘HPX is bulletproof. But when you’re singlehanded sailing in particular, there’s a lot of up and down the stairs,’ says Davies, whose CV includes three circumnavigations and 24 transatlantic crossings. ‘MPX is more flexible, and still does an incredible job of keeping you warm and dry.’

Musto have worked closely with Gore-Tex for more than 20 years to develop the best possible offshore sailing kit. It has been a gradual, evolutionary process based on close relationships with top sailors such as Volvo Ocean Race skippers Sam Davies and Ian Walker, who are always very clear about what works in tough conditions, and where they believe improvements can be incorporated. While HPX is the flagship line in the Musto range, the more affordable MPX benefits from many HPX develop - ments a few years down the line.

The past 10 years have seen big advances with a collection that is every bit as waterproof and durable as previous generations, but with less bulk. The problem is, says Musto’s lead designer for sailing Shane Rhone, perceptions take a while longer to catch up with the new reality: ‘We responded to a demand for lighter garments that still deliver the highest levels of waterproofness and breathability. And we did that, and won some industry awards for innovation.’

So what was the problem? ‘Some of our distributors told us that when customers tried on the gear it felt so light it didn’t seem as if it was going to be as waterproof or as strong or durable – even though all our tests showed that actually it is more durable than ever before.’

Professional sailors who use the gear week in week out have got used to the fact that lighter garments can deliver all you want from the kit, but it might take longer for weekend recreational sailors to change their views.

The perception that is hard to overcome in the calm and dry environment of a shop changing room is that some rival brands look more fitted than Musto’s equivalent garments. But, as professional sailor Pete Cumming points out, in the heat of battle a snug fit is not necessarily what you’re looking for.

Because Cumming has to wear whatever the team gear is for any given project in which he’s competing, he gets to wear a whole variety of gear. ‘There are some clothes out there that fit nicely. They’re all slim fitting, which is fine when you are walking down the street; it looks nice, all the curves in the right places, tight on your arms. Then when you go sailing the first time you bend over it rides up and rucks up. Or you can’t move and stretch to get something, then it gets to the point you just want to take it off and throw it away, because it’s pretty useless for its job on the water.’

As Cumming is involved in many different types of project, from inshore to offshore, keelboat to multihull, he experiences the full breadth of conditions that any sailor would face. He has become one of Musto’s most trusted and honest clothes horses. ‘When you’re offshore and it’s getting really bumpy it’s all the little details that can make or break your day,’ he says.

It’s a personal thing… Vestas bowman Tom Johnson (above) prefers the all-MPX combo rather than the MPX/HPX ‘blend’ of Beyou (main picture). For 2016 Vendée Globe winner Armel Le Cléac’h (MPX smock, below) the only thing that matters is finding a clothing solution that keeps as much of the ocean out as possible when you’re reaching at a steady 45kt on the Ultim foiler Banque Populaire IX (issue 458). While Beyou is filling in time racing on Dongfeng as his new Imoca Charal is being built, Le Cléac’h is busy crisscrossing the north Atlantic

‘Just things like if you’ve got snug-fitting rubber boots they will probably fit well on your feet, but you can’t kick them off easily; and when you are knackered the worst thing in the world is trying to get your boots off. Quite often you want to keep your boots on when you go below so you don’t get wet feet when you are inside the boat, so it’s making sure the leg openings are big enough to slide over the top of the boots.’

Ultimately Rhone and his designers will always pay more attention to what the sailors like Cumming want above all else. But he also wanted to take on the battle of the showroom where Musto are up against some kit where durability is forsaken in favour of appearance. ‘We wanted to address the fit for the new generation of MPX Offshore to create something more streamlined and less bulky. Our aim was to do all this without compromising our 3-Layer System,’ says Rhone. ‘So we have worked hard on the shaping around the shoulders and the arms while body-mapping seams and keeping their number to a minimum. Every seam adds weight and a potential point of weakness, so we’re very pleased with what we’ve achieved.’

Every time a new product is made it’s handed out to sailors to do their worst with it. ‘My job is to try to wreck it,’ says Cumming, ‘really put it through everything I can throw at it, and see what works and what doesn’t. Musto don’t always tell me what they’ve changed, they just tell me to use the kit and bring back honest and unbiased feedback.’ Cumming also comes back with his own strong ideas, such as solving the problems of where to keep your tools. A centrally positioned pocket on a dry smock sounds sensible enough until you put other things like a life-jacket and harness over the top – then it gets hard to gain access to those tools. So now Musto are trialling some logical design solutions.

‘You don’t really know how it’s going to work until you try it in action,’ says Cumming. ‘When you’re doing a job up at the front of the boat and you take tools with you, what’s the best place, which pockets work, what can or can’t I get to when I’m on my knees working? We’ll feed back our experiences with the pockets and Musto will change it until it feels right.’

Rhone echoes this: ‘When we develop kit that’s exactly what we do, we go back to the drawing board, reassess the needs and what’s not working. If we stick with cookie-cutter designs just because that’s how everyone else does it, we are failing as a brand, and I would be failing as a designer.’

Like Sam Davies, Cumming tends to favour HPX bottoms for taking all the knocks and scrapes of scrabbling around on deck, and an MPX top to provide that extra mobility for the shoulders and arms. ‘If your clothing is too stiff and heavy,’ says Davies, ‘it’s amazing how much extra energy you can expend in manoeuvres and when you’re grinding. The MPX still provides all of the waterproofness and durability in some pretty horrible conditions.’ Her additional tip is always to wear a base layer of Merino wool, even in warm conditions, because the wool is so good at wicking away the moisture from the body.

As to that perception that the latest edition of MPX might be too flimsy for purpose, Davies comments: ‘If Musto say it’s going to be good enough for the job I don’t have that question in my mind. I’ve worn Musto for so long I just trust it.’

Click here for more information on Musto »

When the creator of the original televised grand prix skiff series Bill Macartney went looking for a new game he told his ‘creative partners’ Morrelli & Melvin to give him a big set of foils, a powerful rig… and only then some trick hulls to float it all

Everything about the new SuperFoiler racing circuit in Australia is about adrenaline-fuelled speed – and that applies as much to the design and technical development of the equipment as to pace around the course. For the Doyle Sails team tasked with producing the horsepower for these high-octane foiling trimarans the challenge was irresistible, despite the tight timeframes for designing, developing and delivering fast one-design sails for the fleet.

The SuperFoiler circuit is the brainchild of Australian father and son duo, Bill and Jack Macartney, and aims to take over the mantle of the highly successful 18ft skiff grand prix circus, which Bill Macartney pioneered. They commissioned designers Morrelli & Melvin to come up with a supercharged small foiler, sailed by three people all on trapeze, with a brief to perform in 5-25kt. The result is a hot rod, demanding to sail but capable of speeds up to 40kt. ‘The closest thing to these boats are the America’s Cup foiling multihulls,’ says Pete Melvin. Measuring 7.9m long by 5.1m wide, with a 12.5m mast and 33m² sail area, they are highly technical with a mass of control systems to master.

‘The power-to-weight ratio is very high, with a 5m beam and weighing only 250kg,’ says Melvin. ‘Most other boats of comparable size are two to three times heavier.’

To bring the concept to reality Doyle joined forces with Innovation Composites, who built the platforms, and Hall Spars, who supplied the rigs and foils. Doyle CEO Mike Sanderson embraced the concept, describing it as ‘the next level of excitement above the 18-footers and a whole new world’.

Says the loft’s design chief Richard Bouzaid: ‘We started the design work about 18 months ago when the idea of the SuperFoiler circuit got off the ground. We started with an investigation of the relationship between the rig and sails and did a lot of simulation work in that area.’

Developing foiling sails was not an entirely unknown area for the Doyle team. They purchased one of the 10m foiling catamarans used as testbeds for Emirates Team New Zealand’s 2013 America’s Cup programme and have been regular campaigners against a group of similar-sized foiling multihulls on Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour. ‘Some of the research and development work we did on that boat was of value in this exercise as well,’ says Bouzaid.

When the first prototype came out the Macartneys invited a group of top sailors, including Glenn Ashby, Jimmy Spithill, Nathan Outteridge and others, to put the boat through its paces.

Andrew Brown, Doyle’s one-design specialist and an Olympic sailor and coach, attended the trial along with designer Paul Stubbs. Brown is no stranger to foiling, but says his initial trial sail on the SuperFoiler was a revelation. ‘They are fun to watch but terrifying to sail,’ he laughs.

Their first observation was how highly loaded these boats became as the triallists cranked down hard. Trimming the mainsheet is very physical and requires a powerful 90kg-type athlete to handle the loads. Right through the structure of the boat the power generated was exerting eye-opening loads. A dramatic near-pitchpole occurred on the first day of testing when the line holding the leeward board down slid casually but relentlessly through a jam cleat rated at 800kg, as if it didn’t exist. The board shot up, the boat plunged off the foil and went down the mine, catapulting the three trapezes round the front of the mast and leaving everybody shaken and bruised.

Clearly taming the beast was not going to be easy, but nobody was asking for a reduction in horsepower, only for ways to harness it. As Pete Melvin observed drily, getting to grips with control issues was going to ‘require a very special skillset that will take some time to develop’.

For the sailmakers the result of that first testing session was to refine the design, mainly by juggling the distribution of sail area. Says Stubbs: ‘The principal driving power comes from the mainsail, so we made that a little bigger and the jibs a little smaller for better balance.’

The mainsail sets within a wishbone boom. The profile is a very high-aspect rectangular shape, as like a wing as a conventional soft sail can get. As the project developed further refinement went into matching mast shape and luff curves for maximum efficiency.

As with any foiling boat, the key is to get up and fly as quickly as possible. That is a function of trim and technique that demands initial high power from the sails to deliver maximum acceleration and then a quick adjustment to flatten out and reduce drag as the apparent wind rapidly moves forward.

Cunningham trim plays a large role in that shape transition and again the loads involved were considerable, requiring the cunningham purchase to be increased from 16:1 to 64:1.

In keeping with the cutting-edge nature of the exercise, the sails utilise Doyle’s high-tech Stratis technology with a combination of carbon and Technora fibres. ‘At the kind of speeds we are talking about it is vital to have a very stable membrane,’ says Bouzaid. ‘The demands on a pretty small piece of highly loaded cloth are extreme. It is well beyond the mainstream.’ Those qualities saw Stratis material also utilised for the trampolines between the hulls, relying on the stability of Stratis to add structural stiffness to the hull platform.

In the 90s Bill Macartney invented and operated the 18-Foot Skiff Skiff Grand Prix, which set the new benchmark for televised sailing. Few comparable circuits ever matched the presentation of that series and fewer still got anywhere near the level of interest from the non-sailing public. The same team’s SuperFoiler picks up where the skiffs left off, taking a very current route to generating all the drama. Meanwhile, the 18-footers calmed down a (little) bit with a switch to one-design from the virtually unlimited monsters of that grand prix era…

With the launch of the SuperFoiler grand prix circuit fast approaching, the time for refinement and development was very constrained and all the technical partners were under pressure to deliver. ‘With a new project like this the challenge is always in making sure all the elements develop in harmony,’ says Bouzaid. Initially the information comes together slowly as individual partners work on refining their own area. But, as each part affects the other, it all has to work together in the end and inevitably time quickly compresses against the deadline.

In this instance the progression was incredibly fast. The testing of the prototype took place in August 2017 and six completed identical boats had to be delivered in time for the first event of the five-stop summer circuit in Australia in February 2018 – with a line-up of talented professional teams, a TV broadcast schedule and widely dispersed venues all ready to go.

Initially the idea was that the boats would have a light-air rig and a moderate to heavy-air rig, but that was changed to a single rig with two sets of sails. That decision was only made in January, so the Doyle team had less than a month to produce two sets of race sails, plus practice sails for six teams. ‘The guys on the production floor love a challenge like this,’ says Andrew Brown. ‘Working on an entirely new, cutting-edge project of this nature is exciting for everybody involved.’

Excitement is what the SuperFoiler concept is all about, promoting the new grand prix circuit as fast and furious racing involving ‘the best flying sailors in the business’. Not surprisingly, the so-called dream team of Glenn Ashby, Nathan Outteridge and Iain Jensen, fresh out of America’s Cup campaigns in San Francisco and Bermuda, showed a clean pair of heels around the course, winning 21 straight races, before fellow Cup campaigner Paul Campbell-James (Luna Rossa 2013, BAR 2017) broke their winning streak.

But the others are learning fast and the gap is closing. Foiling gybes are making an appearance and as the skill levels climb foiling tacks look tantalisingly close.

‘The crazy thing, ‘says Bouzaid, ‘is that all those loads that took us a bit by surprise when we had those top-gun sailors pushing the prototype so hard during the testing sessions, they’ve all gone out of the window. As soon as the racing started we saw a whole new dimension of loads, much higher than anything we saw in testing.’

Clearly the development path has some way to run… while the boats themselves will only get faster.

Click here for more information on Doyle Sails »