#KITESURFING – It's encouraging to know there's always somone out there pushing the envelope. Looking at this next generation craft in the vid below shows there's a big future for sailing but just whether it's future's in the water or in the air or both we're ain't sure yet...

The objective of the 'kiteboat' project  is to evolve waterborne transportation to use kites as propulsion. project leaders Don Montague and Joe Brock certainly look like they're having fun jumping waves in Maui on the Kitefoiler with a 16 sqm kite.

To date, kite propulsion has primarily been used for sport, in kitesurfing and single-person traction kiting.

In small-scale traction kiting, the force of the kite can be controlled by an individual holding on to the kite directly, but as the kite gets larger, harnessing its power becomes more difficult. The challenge is to develop winches, controls, and launch and recovery systems for larger kites, boat-specific kites for different conditions, and kite-specific boats and foil systems.

The kiteboat mission is to design a purpose-built vessel that is specifically designed to harness kite power and to advance kite design and kite controls to the point that power-assisted or autonomously controlled kites can be used by a broad audience.