cruise control

Earthrace is no ordinary boat – she’s on a mission to race around the globe and her fuel is food for thought

WORDS JULES MARSHALL
PHOTOGRAPHY FLORIS LEEUWENBERG

Earthrace in New Zealand

The three-hulled Earthrace powerboat is probably the most extraordinary vessel ever to take to the ocean waves. Looking like a cross between a jet plane and a futuristic boat, she aims to break the round-the-world speed record powered exclusively by biofuel, and promote awareness of the environment.

Featuring wave-piercing design in one of its first non-military applications, Earthrace flies through waves rather than riding over them. Specifically designed to perform at high speeds in the world’s toughest ocean conditions, she will at times submarine right through waves up to 15m high.

Earthrace’s crew, with Captain
and CEO Pete BethunePlus she’s an eco-boat, running exclusively on bio-diesel – that is, energy derived from living plants, vegetables and animal derivatives. For a stunt, she even ran for a while on human fat donated from a liposuction clinic!

Earthrace is the brainchild of skipper and CEO of her operating company Pete Bethune, an amiable New Zealander with a mission. Bethune, 41, has his roots in the oil industry, having worked as an oil exploration engineer in New Zealand, the North Sea and North Africa. Today though, he is passionate about the environment and believes strongly that renewable fuels must become a key part of our transport fuel mix.

“It all started more than four years ago when I saw a video of a wave-piercing single hull boat. I was fascinated, but it was military technology and hard to find anything about it. I started researching, and along the way came across the website of the UIM (Union Internationale Motonautique, the Monaco-based body governing record attempts for circumnavigating the world by powerboat).

“I was at the same time researching alternative fuels for road transport and became a convert to bio-diesel. And I just thought it’d be cool to make one of these wave-piercing power boats and use it for the promotion of biofuels by going round the world in record time.”

Bethune says it took about a year to figure out how he was going to piece it all together, and then with Craig Loomes, a designer specialising in wave-piercing boats, he built a
6.6m prototype to prove the tri-hull concept. “It has a number of performance advantages that make it better than a single hull,” he says. They adjusted the prototype having proved its concept and started raising funds.

Is it a bird, a boat, a plane
or
a submarine?This took some time and the project was very nearly abandoned, but there are now over 200 supporters, mostly providing goods and services like free fuel.

The prototype enabled the design team to better understand this new class of vessel, and the knowledge was then applied to the full race boat design. The result is a 24m trimaran built of carbon fibre and kevlar composites stretched over a solid foam base. Its fuel capacity of 10,000 litres gives it a range of 6,000km – plenty to cross the widest oceans with.

Earthrace took a year to build in Auckland and offers a dramatically smoother ride than traditional deep-V designs, minimising stress on the vessel as well as the crew. Wave piercing allows the boat to run continuously at high speed under both flat and rough sea conditions – a key element in getting the record for circumnavigating the globe.

With a maximum speed of 45 knots (90km/h), the cruising speed of 25 knots (50km/h) still creates an 85 decibel noise from the twin 350 kW (540bhp) engines. With the constant swoosh as the water rushes over the bow and the loud slap as it lands on the other side of a wave, the ocean trips are gruelling for the crew locked inside the tiny cockpit for up to six days at a time, even with the use of noise-cancelling earphones.

A crew member

goes
for a nap

between
shifts

In March 2007, Earthrace began her world circumnavigation record attempt in Barbados. Despite not having all the necessary funding or fuel in place at some of the more remote stops, they decided to “fly by the seat of their pants” and organise everything along the way.

There were a few incidents, including hitting a log off Singapore, but at the beginning of June, Earthrace pulled out of her record attempt when she suffered damage after hitting floating debris in Spanish waters, flooding one of her watertight compartments. With the clock ticking, the crew were unable to make suitable repairs in time to stay on track for the record.

“We had three storms in a row and the third one damaged the hull enough to stop us in Spain,” says Bethune. “Based on the numbers we got, we reckon we can do it in about 60 days (the current record is 74), but you do need a bit of luck. Our logistics could have been better – we spent four days in India waiting for fuel that was stuck in customs; we lost time on spare parts we should have had. You learn a lot. We’ll be better prepared when we try again.”

the Earthrace routeIn the meantime, they toured ports around Europe to raise funds and supporters, and continued with what was the whole point of the exercise in the first place: promoting biofuel.

“Biofuel is not a panacea to transport energy issues but it can play a wider role in starting the journey towards sustainability,” says Bethune. But he admits, with horror stories of palm oil plantations and global food shortages, the perception of biofuel has changed since he started his publicity quest.

“Cutting down rainforest is just not a smart idea, and not what biofuel is about,” says Bethune emphatically. “It’s about countries utilising their resources as best they can. In New Zealand, for example, we could make up 6% of our total fuel costs from rendered animal fat.”

Pete Bethune and navigator
Alain BridesonNow the team is trying to break the world record again. The 2008 record attempt to circumnavigate the globe started on 1 March, taking off from the Spanish port of Valencia (chosen because the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are generally most settled). The aim is to spend three days getting to the Azores, then another eight to Puerto Rico, through the Panama Canal, up to San Diego and across to Hawaii, the Marshall Islands, Pulau and five days after that, Singapore. The last legs will take them to to Cochin (India) then Salalah (Oman), through the Suez Canal and back to Valencia around the end of April.

It’s going to be a race like no other. To watch the progress, go to www.earthrace.net.