John Walker writes:-
I first got the idea for a wingsail back in the middle sixties, in the days when the various grades of marine fuel oil were not only cheap but seemed likely to last for ever, and the idea of global Climate Change was virtually unknown outside the laboratories of a few worried climatologists.
My original wingsail prototype, Planesail, was conceived after a humorous (to other people anyway) incident when, as a young aircraft engineer, designing wings and flaps in the aircraft industry during the week and sailing at the weekends, I was sailing an old fashioned yacht on the Norfolk Broads (which if you don’t know them are wonderful sailing places in the eastern part of England). She had brown sails, and a lot of rather squeaky little brass sheaves in the blocks controlling the long wooden boom at the foot of the mainsail.
This meant, especially in the light winds we had on that day, that after a gybe, where the boom had to swing across the stern in a more or less controlled fashion, it was usually rather reluctant to run right out again on the opposite tack because of the friction in the sheaves. So I had come to an arrangement with my husky young crew, Charles, that as soon as the boom had banged across he would give it a good firm push to pull the main sheet briskly through the sheaves and help to get the mainsail reset. The jib had its own boom and traveller, and was therefore self tacking.
Well, as often happens in those crowded waters, a tubby little motorboat came happily pottering down the middle of the river as we were tacking up towards her. The helmsman was probably wondering why this sailing boat was zig zagging backwards and forwards across the river, and possibly assumed that we were either drunk or just playing about.
Anyway, I suddenly realised that he had no intention of getting out of our way, and yelling “Gybe Oh” at the top of my voice I pulled the tiller up towards the wind, jammed it between my knees and began furiously hauling in on the main sheet to get the long wooden boom as near to the centreline as possible before it banged across the stern.
We missed him by no more than a few inches, and I’m told that his wife waved cheerily at us from the cockpit as they puttered on their way. Charlie had by this time grabbed the boom and, as previously agreed, was powerfully heaving it forward. The sheaves squealed, the rope snaked up from the cockpit floor, all exactly as we done it many times before. However, this time I had somehow got not one but two loops of rope round my legs, and found myself being inexorably hoisted aloft, upside down, my ankles locked in a perfect clove hitch.
Alarmed by my cries for help Charlie turned round, and instantly let go the boom, but by now the sail was full of wind, the boom went steadily on its way towards the shrouds, until my feet were jammed against the upper block.
“Grab the tiller, you fool, or we’ll be into the bank," I cried, but Charlie was completely incapable, prostrate on the cockpit bench, laughing until the tears ran down his face. Finally he regained some semblance of control and helped me down, and we were just able to avoid a collision with a big wherry, whose passengers were lining the rail, laughing and taking pictures.
“I say”, said Charlie, still grinning from ear to ear, ”If I nip below and get the camera, would you mind doing that again?”
So I decided, there and then, to see what I could do to bring sailing technology into the 20th century, and to improve it and develop it in the 21st. After a great deal of sketching in my notebook I came up with the idea of the self trimming wingsail, identical in principle (but rather different in its details) to the modern Walker wingsail. I would replace the cloth, boom, ropes, winches, blocks and so on with what would be effectively half a glider, its wing set up on end, mounted on a freely rotating vertical axis bearing where the centre of gravity of the glider would have been, mass balanced about that point like any glider so that when the boat was not level (which is of course almost always, especially in waves of any size) the tail would not tend to 'fall to the low side'. The whole thing would be trimmed to the wind by a tail identical in principle to the glider’s elevator (or stabilizer). I called it a wingsail.
Small wingsails could be operated by hand, because the effort involved in adjusting the angle of the tail was very small, while even much larger ones would need very little power to operate (and in due course, just in time) along would come affordable photovoltaic cells. And (once computer control techniques had been developed. This was the middle sixties, remember.) my wingsails could be computer controlled, so that capsize and overpowering could at last be eliminated.
A simple hand lever, like that of a power boat, connected to the tail, would give thrust ahead, astern or neutral, and both tacking and gybing, to go from sailing with the wind on one side of the boat to sailing with the wind on the other side, were going to be completely automatic. You would just steer the boat on to the new course, and your Walker wingsail would do the rest. Excited, I began to make models, testing them on a local pond.
One day, when I had reached the stage of needing to move on to building a full sized prototype, I was doing trials on my latest model, which was very fast and literally hissed as it reached across the pond. Then I had to run round to the other side, turn the model round and send her back again after making any adjustments necessary. I had for the first time got auto-tacking installed, using a cam mechanism at the base of the wingsail, and was trying to optimize the lever ratios involved.
Concentrating hard, I was surprised when a polite young voice behind me asked if I needed any assistance. A big Range Rover had silently pulled up on the road along the edge of the pond, and a young man about ten years old had climbed down and walked across the grass. His father and some younger brothers and sisters were sitting in the car, probably wondering what this rather disheveled young man was doing with his curious hissing contraption.
I explained what I was trying to do, and the boy stationed himself on the opposite side of the pond. This saved me a great deal of time and running around. We got quite good at resetting the rudder each time, trying to send the model right into each other’s hands. In fact, after a little practice, he did at least as well (if not better) than I did.
After twenty minutes or so of this, during which time I was able to get ahead really well with the cam follower optimization, his father climbed down from the Range Rover and came across to ask me what I was doing. I explained that I had this wingsail idea, which I hoped could could revolutionise sailing, and save fuel on big ships. He asked a few penetrating questions, and then asked me about my plans. I explained that I had gone about as far as I could with models, and wanted to buy a pair of catamaran hulls to build a full sized prototype propelled by my first ever full sized wingsail.
“How much will that cost?” he asked, and I replied that I thought I should probably have to pay around two thousand pounds.
“Well, we must be getting back for tea now, but here is enough for one of them, with my very best wishes”, he said, taking out his chequebook and writing out a cheque for a thousand pounds.
“But how shall I be able to get in touch with you?” I called, as he walked back to his car.
“Write to me care of the bank”, he said with a charming smile, and shepherding his family into the car he drove off into the Dartmoor mist. I had my first shareholder.
A few months later, in 1966 I think, other shareholders having come on board and Planesail Limited incorporated, I was able to launch the 30 ft trimaran Planesail, my first full sized prototype. I was very pleased to find that she was an absolute delight to sail, although, since in her quadriplane rig I had decided not to incorporate the high thrust devices with which I was still experimenting at model scale, she was never very fast. Still, she made a lot of friends and influenced a lot of people.
I clearly remember a middle aged couple who had made an appointment to come down to the Hamble for a test sail. The husband came on board with alacrity, but when I offered to help his wife down from the quay into Planesail she protested that she had always hated sailing, and intended to stay in the car.
I said that in that case she should definitely come along for the ride, and that in fact I would teach her to sail the boat first. Horrified, at first she flatly refused, but eventually she was persuaded to come aboard, and sat in the pilot’s seat looking very apprehensive. She cheered up a little when I explained that there were only two controls, the ordinary car sized steering wheel, to control direction, and the thrust lever, to control speed, and if necessary to put the air brakes on.
Five minutes later we were, painfully slowly, overtaking a typical monohull cruiser on a close reach as we sailed up towards Emsworth, and her husband watched in growing disbelief as she cried out excitedly:-
“Mr Walker, Mr Walker, how can I make her go faster?”
Aboard the monohull a great deal of surreptitious sail trimming and tweaking was going on, but I suggested that, being to leeward, we were in the other boat’s dirty wind, and why didn’t she try overtaking on the other side. “Just turn the wheel as if you were driving a car,” I said. “The wingsail will look after itself.”
So we made a stylish S-curve across the other boat’s wake, and once we had lined up again in cleaner air Planesail accelerated away easily.
Her husband managed (after some difficulty in persuading his wife to give up the controls) to have his own turn at the wheel, and was just as enthralled as his wife had been.
“And she sails so level, even when hard on the wind,” he marvelled. “I’ve never been aboard a multihull before. But can’t they tip right over in a strong wind and stay there, upside down?”.
I explained that I was developing an automatic governing system which would prevent overpowering and capsize for our production boats, and after a very pleasant afternoon on the water he gave me our first ever cash deposit, although he explained that he would want a larger boat than the admittedly rather minimally fitted out Planesail.
The publicity that Planesail achieved led me to the Amateur Yacht Research Society, then as now the premier think tank for innovative boats, where I was slightly acerbically informed that I hadn’t been the first to invent the wingsail, as I could see from AYRS booklet 14. There I found some details of Fin Utne’s work during the second world war in Norway, and on carrying out further research I discovered that the first inventor of the concept was probably a German called Anton Flettner in 1923.
After Flettner, an occasional specialised wing was used on racing or experimental craft, and then in Norway during the second world war Fin Utne, with whom many years later I got in touch, built a dear little boat called “Flaunder” which worked just as Flettner’s aluminium wings might have done twenty years before. Sadly, Norway was then occupied by the Axis powers, and “Flaunder” was confiscated by the Gestapo as a potential weapon of war, and destroyed.
When I contacted Fin in I think 1967 he told me that he too had been disappointed to discover that Flettner had got there first, but that in his long experience he had found it not uncommon for a good idea to be invented completely independently by two or more people.
“The important thing,” he said, “is not to give up. Flettner did not persevere, and neither did I. So don’t give up. Persevere! Never give up!” Well, I’m still remembering his words, forty years later.
Remembering that good advice helped me to survive through the business struggles which seem inseparable from any innovative project, perhaps especially in the UK. After a particularly bruising episode I went off to nurse my wounds and recover my self possession in the perfect sunshine of Greece, where I did rather well as a freelance naval architect, designing commercial vessels and cruise liners up to 30,000 tons.
Then, in around 1976, haunted by the certainty that the marketing and technology of my wingsails had never been faulted, I returned to the UK and started another little company on a shoestring, and built the Flyer (named in homage to my heroes, the Wright brothers, and a lovely boat) After a few difficult (and also underfunded) years that company and its half dozen or so shareholders were incorporated, in 1981, into a new, and we thought at last properly capitalised, company called Walker Wingsail Systems plc (WWS).
The financial arrangements promised for WWS quite quickly went rancid and gave us some nightmare times, but we got through that by somehow managing to refinance the company, and we went on to design, build and sell the first truly practical production wingsails in the world. In 1986 we put a big 8 tonne Walker wingsail on the mv Ashington, a 6,500 ton dry cargo vessel which saved up to 20% of her fuel costs, and then, when the Saudis opened the taps and flooded the world with cheap oil I turned my attention back to the small craft market.
Power yachts are in fact just as serious polluters and consumers of precious fossil fuel as ships, without even the excuse that they are useful for carrying goods. So our ecological and economical Walker wingsail yachts, which have no boom to swing across and brain the crew, and are computer governed to eliminate the danger of capsize, became, and remain, very interesting indeed, especially to US customers.
We sailed Blue Nova, our 54 ft proof of concept boat, successfully across the Atlantic twice, the first time safely and securely through a severe hurricane, Claudette. That story is told in “Wings Across The Water” on another page. (see here). At the Miami Boat Show we were told we were a threat to public safety, because the long lines of people waiting to go aboard Blue Nova were sinking the floating pontoons!!
After some very successful Boat Shows in the States we sailed Blue Nova Back to Plymouth with eight cash deposits in our pockets, and I designed the Zefyr 44 boats. I had remained in touch with my friends in the Aeronautical Engineering Department at Cambridge University, where my dear friend Professor Austyn Mair, disbelieving the high performance of my wingsail design as reported by his graduates in their 4th year projects, had repeated the Markham wind tunnel tests himself, only to find that his results were even more impressive than those of his graduates. World record breaking, he wrote in a technical paper which I still cherish.
One of the WWS Zefyr 44 trimarans, owned by a Dutch couple, has sailed successfully around the world. Sadly, WWS, short of capital and assailed by forces both within and without, failed in 1998, just as the projections were looking rosy. We had delivered three Zefyrs, had the next three on the production line, and had received cash deposits for three more.
All the fundamental elements of a modern wingsail were present in my first prototype; operation of the wingsail by a powerboat style lever which gave thrust ahead when the lever was moved ahead, and thrust astern, for putting the brakes on, sailing astern and doing fancy three-point turns by pulling the lever back. Since then of course we have been able to enlist the power of the modern computer for control and security.
So now, with much more advanced technology to offer and potential customers for both ships and small craft at last recognizing the dangers of Climate Change, I hope that we can at last achieve the success and value we have always been working towards.
If the price of oil had not crashed so comprehensively in 1986, from $54 to $7, I am convinced that we could have licensed our excellent Walker wingsail technology to the Japanese. However, Saudi Arabia opened the taps and flooded the word with cheap oil to regain its market share, and that market was summarily deferred for more than 20 years, until the present day in fact.
It is important to realise that the ability to increase production at a stroke like that no longer exists. Saudi Arabia has elderly fields with strictly limited pumping capacity. Iraq and Nigeria are frequently in flames, and costly resources like the Canadian tar sands, the oil under the Alaska permafrost, oil locked in shale rocks, and the reserves lying thousands of metres below the stormy North Atlantic, are all uneconomic except at high oil prices. The days of cheap oil are therefore over, and wise executives are planning for survival and success against that background.
We had arranged a visit to the UK before Christmas, and were looking forward to a meeting of directors and the professional advisers to the Company in Salisbury on Monday 20 December. However Jack Frost (and the Siberian snowfields) then exerted their wintry powers on Northern Europe generally. We were in the air on Saturday 18th December, expecting to land at Heathrow at about 3:30pm, when we were told that the airport had closed and we should have to divert to Brussels. I have to say that a very slithery landing on the icy Brussels runway made me wish I knew less about flying than I do !
We were on the ground there for about six hours, before being de-iced and flown, tired and hungry, back to Athens, finally getting home at about 2am on Sunday morning. Nearly all the other proposed attendees for the Meeting were snowed in, so the meeting had to be postponed in any case. We anxiously watched the weather forecasts, and were finally able to reschedule our Meeting for 6th January 2011.
This time all went smoothly, and it was a good and constructive Meeting. We were able for the first time to meet face to face with Peter Warr of Batt Broadbent, our new solicitors, Andrew Coldwell and Peter Richardson of Moore Stephens, our new auditors, and Andy James from Barclays Bank in Salisbury. We were able to move towards agreement on an Intellectual Property Agreement, with goodwill on both sides.
We now have a Company Bank Account although, since we have to deal with a number of Company Law administrative tasks before we can encash the cheques that many of our shareholders have sent us, we cannot have a precise idea of our financial situation until the AGM. I've put a paragraph at the end of this newsletter with some explanation of the delay.
Our Norwegian ship owning friends, Wallenius Wilhelmsen and PGS, are still keen, and there are two main options open to us in terms of raising money. This is where your own thoughts might come into play. If you have time, please let us know which alternative sounds preferable to you:-
1. A new prospectus under the terms of the EIS, or:-
2. Seeking just one or two large investors through a private placing?
I stress that no such decision has yet been made, because we are still collecting as much information as we can. In any case, when we think that we have as much firm knowledge, quotations etc as we are like to get, and know the level of funds available, the alternatives will be put to shareholders as resolutions at the Annual General Meeting so that they, who after all are the owners of the Company, may decide. This informal request for input is more in the way of a straw poll to help us in our work.
Briefly, the EIS route should certainly enable us to complete and test our 12m prototype and demonstrator (under my personal supervision), and to invite Norwegian (and other) sea captains to come on board, push a wingsail lever, feel the force, and explore the controllability, before hopefully making favourable reports to their companies which should lead to our first orders for our latest Walker wingsail technology. It will also have the benefit of bringing younger blood into the Company, and some of the new younger shareholders may bring valuable business experience too.
The EIS route is however unlikely to provide sufficient funding to get Shadotec plc fully independent, building, selling and installing our wingsails in large numbers, and that would need to be the subject of a second tranche of investment, possibly through a different method.
The private placing route could have the benefit of a possibly quicker timescale to full investment, provided that the Company can afford the up front 'entry fee' costs. That method would of course also enable us to complete and test our prototype and demonstrator, which is of prime importance. Present indications are that we could afford the EIS route, but may not be able to afford the private placing option. And as the old saying goes: - 'You can only cut your coat according to your cloth.' However, give us your thoughts, and indeed any suggestions you might have for a possible 'third way', which might prove fruitful?
I stress again that we still have completely open minds, which is why we should very much appreciate any thoughts you may have on the subject? In any case we believe that extra support will be available from, for example, the British Carbon Trust or some other institutional source, but not we think until we can show that we have been able to draw a clear and unequivocal line under the past and raised sufficient capital to warrant a search for matching funds.
Andrew Coldwell of Moore Stephens is confident that he can circulate a set of audited accounts to 31.12. 2009 very soon. This suggests that a largely postal voting Annual General Meeting could be scheduled for a date in February or early March.
As I mentioned above, we have been advised that there are a couple of Company Law administrative points that need to be dealt with before we can issue shares to those people who have applied for them. One of these relates to ‘pre-emption’ rights, which are the rights for all shareholders to apply for shares in any share issue, the number of shares to which they are entitled being calculated according to the number of shares they already hold. Peter Warr has calculated how many shares need to be offered to each shareholder in order to allow us to issue the shares that have already been applied for, and a ‘share offer’ letter has been enclosed with the latest newsletter showing each shareholder's personal entitlement. This process simply gives all shareholders the right to take up shares, and there is no obligation/pressure on any shareholder to do so. We are, however, required by law to make it clear that if all the shares on offer are not subscribed for, then we may still issue those shares that have been applied for. The problem can be solved very simply by means of a special resolution at the AGM. What this means for those shareholders who have already sent in cheques is that we will at last be able to have the appropriate shares issued. If you have not done so and would like to subscribe for further shares, that too will be possible.
Also at the AGM we shall present resolutions which, if approved, will instruct the board to either proceed with a Prospectus or to go along the Private Placing route. As I said at the beginning of this note:-" Nothing happens as quickly or as smoothly as we would like', but we have overcome all the obstacles placed in our way so far and we, none of us, intend to stop now."
I’m living in Greece now, and have no desire to take an executive management role in Shadotec plc. I'll just keep inventing, designing and solving technical problems.
John Walker
