AYRS: Today’s “experimental” boats… tomorrow’s standard kit

One of the original Experimental boats - Vagabond, first with a trapeeze.

AYRS: Today’s “experimental” boats… tomorrow’s standard kit

If you ever want proof that sailing’s future is built by people who refuse to leave “well enough alone”, allow me to introduce the Amateur Yacht Research Society (AYRS) — proudly flying the flag for practical tinkering and slightly bonkers ideas that (annoyingly) keep turning out to be right. Their website strapline is basically “where the ideas are”, which is both inspiring and faintly dangerous to anyone who owns a toolbox and has access to epoxy.

What I love is the AYRS attitude: experimental doesn’t mean “daft”. It means testable. Measurable. Arguable over a cup of tea (or something stronger) with diagrams on the back of an envelope. And history keeps repeating itself: the things that look odd at first—new hull shapes, foils, rigs, control systems—have a habit of turning up a few years later as “best practice”… and then ten minutes after that as “class rules”. (If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of older sailors muttering, “I told you so,” across the boat park.)

The AYRS homepage has a glorious snapshot from Weymouth Speed Week 2022, where the “boats” were back—real boats, not just boards and wings—and the line-up reads like a sci-fi casting call. SailRocket on the hardstanding, Icarus (James Grogono’s pioneering foiling catamaran) back on the water and sailing nicely on her foils, plus Kyle Stoneham’s Vampire Project boat described as very fast—even beating the board sailors on a light-wind day. And then there’s “Vari-Scari”, because of course there is.

Here’s the bit that matters for the rest of us mere mortals pottering about on rivers and club waters: the trickle-down is real. Today’s speed-week oddity becomes tomorrow’s “why wouldn’t you?” fitting. Hydrofoils? Once experimental, now mainstream in whole corners of the sport. Rigs and sail aero? The sort of thing you’d once expect from an America’s Cup shed… now discussed in ordinary sailing circles with alarming confidence. That’s what AYRS does well: it gathers the experiments, publishes the thinking, and makes it easier for good ideas to spread without everyone having to reinvent the same wheel (or foil) from scratch.

If you fancy a deep dive, AYRS also has a huge back-catalogue of downloadable booklets covering things like catamarans, hydrofoils, sails & aerofoils, dinghy design, sailboat testing, yacht wind tunnels, and more—proper rabbit-hole material for anyone who enjoys going to bed thinking about lift/drag ratios and waking up wondering if their boat could benefit from “just one small modification”. (Famous last words.)

So yes: today’s experimental boats really can be the standard for tomorrow’s boats. And whether you’re racing, cruising, or learning on the Thames like me, it’s a reassuring thought: sailing doesn’t stand still—it simply gets tested, argued about, improved, and then quietly copied. If you want a peek at what might be coming next, AYRS is a very good place to start.