(no subject)

I have a very nice sailboat with an amount of sail that causes non-sailing people to say things like, "Damn, that's a lot of sail on that boat." It is a very nice boat. I like my boat. However, there exist rather more expensive sailboats (still for one person, though) that are faster than the one I have. They're not very boat-like for normal-people values of boat because they're all pointy and narrow and, when the wind blows, they rise up out of the water and are only tethered to it by an underwater structure called a foil. If it were not for the foil, the boat would take off and fly -- new ones weigh about sixty pounds and are made mostly of expensive composite carbon fiber stuff. Meet the International Moth. (The nice boats in the video that it is sailing past at one hell of a clip? Those are the kind of boat I have.) The downside of the International Moth is that it apparently takes about a thousand swims before you can get the damn thing up onto the foils and keep it there for longer than three seconds.