Welcome to bootfans.be, where you can read the daily news in the boating industry in a light-hearted way… All joking aside, the boating world is almost in the same boat as the car industry: there, too, more and more attention will have to be paid to to zero-emission alternatives for transporting people or goods by water. With the additional difficulty that you need much more energy to sail over water than to drive over land. Something for which the Swedish Candela has found a solution.
hydrofoil
The solution is the hydrofoil. Now that is not a new idea: the principle was already developed in the 1900s. The idea is that once a boat gets up to speed, it is pushed upwards by the hydrofoils, raising the hull above the water and significantly reducing ship drag. What is new is to combine the principle with an electric powertrain, so that you need far fewer large batteries to sail longer distances.
In the case of the Candela C-8, the battery of a Polestar 2 Standard Range, 69 kWh in size, is used, giving the boat a cruising range of 57 nautical miles (105.6 km) with a cruising speed of 22 knots ( 40.7 km/h). According to Candela, with a normal boat you barely get half the sailing range with a battery of 110 kWh. In addition, in a hydrofoil you are much less affected by wave action, which helps with seasickness. The big downside? The starting price of 330,000 euros, which you can raise to 421,500 euros if you go wild on the option list. You can buy a lot of Polestars with that…
