Something Completely Different: MODX 70 with Inflatable Sails

HAND IT TO THE FRENCH FOR THEIR RELENTless efforts to drag sailing and yacht design into the future. The latest inspiration comes from a company called Ocean Development in Lorient, which has partnered with the design firm VPLP and the inflatable sail, retractable mast inventors at Aeroforce Wing to create a sailing vessel that is truly unlike almost anything ever launched, the MODX 70.

They started with a super-light carbon infused catamaran hull and deck for which VPLP are renown in racing circles. They have designed plenty of MOD 70 trimaran race boats that are popular in

Europe, so creating this new cruising catamaran on a similar platform, was not much of a stretch.

Next step was to get the team at Aeroforce to design a rig with a mast on each hull instead of along the cat’s centerline. This has proven to be an efficient way to arrange the sail plan on a cat and American designer Chris White has several of his Atlantic series cats sailing the world with similar rigs, albeit with fixed masts and more traditional fabric sails.

The Aeroforce sails are inflatable and retractable. When furled, the NACA foil-shaped sails stow in their deck pods on top of each hull. The carbon masts retract or telescope onto the hulls. When

It’s time to go sailing, electric pumps start to inflate the sails and as they rise into sky the masts telescope upward with them.

You can sail the boat with one sail or both and the sails can be reefed as the wind rises. In heavy weather you can reef the sails down to really small shapes to suit the boat’s motion, balance and seakeeping abilities.

Since Ocean Development always conceived of the MODX 70 as having a zero-carbon footprint, the next phase of development was to partner with a firm with expertise in energy management and electric propulsion. Mad In! Tech, a French company already immersed in the development of systems for French and European racing boats fit the bill. They developed a system of solar panels, chargers, batteries, inverters and 40-Kw electric motors to drive the boat under power and to handle all of the electrical loads aboard, including the sail-control systems and all instruments.

The MODX 70 is also the product of the French government and non-profit organizations that have helped to fund the development and design work and have assisted with their institutional knowledge in green, zero-carbon technology.

A cat with a purpose, the MODX 70 is intended to be an example of how we might propel vessels across oceans in the future without creating any carbon pollution. In this mode, it is also dedicated to addressing the scourge of plastic pollution in our oceans. So, the final piece of the partnership puzzle was to join forces with Race for Water, which is a foundation dedicated to cleaning up our oceans, lakes, rivers and water sources world-wide. The MODX 70 is just the kind of ocean-going vessel that will help this non-profit foundation get their message out to the world.

Click here to learn more about this amazing and innovative project.

Family Afloat: The Commissioning of Sacre Bleu Part One: Les Sables-d’Olonne, France

by Jim Toomey

JULY 10, 2015: WE BEGAN OUR SAILING adventure with an ocean crossing the easy way—in a commercial jet. After a long flight to Paris and a short commuter hop, we met our boat in Les Sablesd’Olonne, a beach town on the Atlantic coast of southwestern France and the launching point for the nearby Lagoon catamaran factory. Our boat show purchases and other gear were waiting for us in a shipping container that Valerie had arranged to arrive in Les Sables when we did. The day before, our new catamaran had been delivered to a nearby boatyard, and a work crew had already started commissioning her. We found an apartment overlooking the entrance to the harbor, with a balcony where I could watch vessels big and small leave the safety of port and disappear over the horizon. In just two weeks’ time, we would be doing the same.

We had left our comfortable lives behind and were now officially nomads, scrambling to adjust to our new lives of continuous disruption and change. I was trying to fit entire workdays into smaller blocks of time here and there, writing and drawing the comic strip, while Valerie worked the phones and email in her native French, making arrangements with the marine contractors that would help with commissioning. Our children, Madeleine and William, now severed from their internet connection, took to beachcombing in front of the apartment, an encouraging sign that they could embrace the real world as their playground when left with no alternative.

Sacre Bleu touches water for the first time.

Our new boat was sitting in a boatyard across town, but it was already getting dark, and we would have to wait till tomorrow to see her. We were now officially boat owners, but the boat still had no name, so we spent our first heady night in the apartment deciding what to call her. As with both of our children and the dog, Valerie and I flipped a coin for naming rights. I won, which meant that I had a choice between naming the boat or having an enjoyable trip on a boat named by my wife.

Valerie hit on Sacre Bleu for two reasons. She pointed out that I frequently use colorful language when things go wrong. In French, “Sacre Bleu” is a minced oath standing in for sacre dieu, or “sacred God,” a phrase that should not be uttered in polite company. Also, the literal translation, “sacred blue,” refers to our new lives on the blue part of the map and our love of the ocean.

The next morning, we assembled our folding bikes, which we had retrieved from the shipping container, and pedaled through morning rush hour to the boatyard to meet Sacre Bleu. There she was, the only recreational boat in a dusty yard full of overworked fishing trawlers. The mast had not yet been stepped, and she still lacked a boom and rigging, not to mention sails, so our new home was still a work in progress. The deck was a good twelve feet off the ground, and we all took turns climbing the ladder tilted up against the transom to get our first peek at the interior. Inside, a mildly toxic, fresh resin smell permeated the air, and on every surface a fine film of factory dust had settled.

Valerie and I were overjoyed to be finally standing on the magic carpet that was going to take us on the ride of our lives. Madeleine and William, eyes wide and mouths agape, surveyed their new home in silence. “We’re all going to live here for a year?” asked Madeleine, hoping to open a door and discover a much larger room with a couch and an entertainment center inside. We instructed the kids to pick their cabins, and they both chose the larger aft cabin. Madeleine pulled age rank, though William maintained he had called dibs first. It was our first conflict. The boat was already starting to feel like home.

The following day, we returned to watch a travel lift pick up our new 16-ton baby and gently set her free in the ocean. The mast, boom and sails had been installed, and Sacre Bleu was beginning to look like a proper sailboat. We fired up the twin diesel engines, and Valerie took the helm and drove her on her maiden cruise—the quartermile run from the boatyard to a dock we shared with a dozen other new Lagoon catamarans.

The chandlery was a five-minute walk from the dock, and we made that walk so many times and got so friendly with the owner, Willy, that by the second week we were inviting him to the boat for happy hour. Instead of slowing down for the inconvenience of paying, Willy opened a credit account and saved all the pain for the last day. We could walk past customers waiting in line, wave a $50 stainless steel shackle, say “put it on our tab, Willy,” and stroll out. We felt important. When the time came to settle the invoices, Willy pulled out a shoebox and an adding machine, and we realized how our importance had grown.

Every morning for the two weeks of commissioning, the four of us rode our bikes from the apartment to the boat, where we began our day of meeting contractors, attempting projects, abandoning projects, running up the tab at Willy’s, and finding new hiding places to store new supplies and gear that we were just discovering we needed. Most components on the boat were factory installed, but we had ordered enough modifications and addons to keep the contractors coming and going, measuring and cutting, texting and smoking well into a third week. The rest of the time we explored farther and wider on our folding bicycles, following paths that took us out of town and into the countryside. We were beginning to feel comfortable, as if Les Sables-d’Olonne were just another neighborhood in Annapolis, Maryland— a neighborhood with a lot more cafes where the patrons seem to drink wine at all hours of the day.

At the end of our second week, we moved out of the apartment and onto the boat, officially becoming a family afloat, departing a world of abundance and privacy and entering a world of scarcity and space shared not only with each other but also with a bevy of workers.

At the end of the third week, the contractors hit a stopping point and we declared Sacre Bleu to be seaworthy. Instead of a conventional boom, we installed a wider “canoe” boom that provided a safe perch for crew to climb up and fold the mainsail, an ideal task for our nimble children. We added an extra reefer in the exterior dining area so that we would never be too far from a chilled bottle of wine. Our new watermaker gave us an infinite supply of freshwater from the ocean. A WI-FI booster antenna mounted to the top of the mast would help us find a signal from a greater distance. With wine, water and WI-FI, nothing could hold us back.

However, we did not yet feel any great impetus to cast off the lines and sail away. We had finished our own preparations—provisioning, stowing gear, and, literally, learning the ropes—and we were now officially over-preparing, a process with no defined end. I could’ve spent the rest of the summer tethered to the wharf in Les Sables. In any direction we walked, we found a restaurant that served a casual, exquisite and inexpensive meal. The farmers’ market looked like a food museum, with dozens of individual vendors offering the full spectrum of France’s glorious cuisine, from dozens of varieties of cheese to breads and pastries of all shapes and sizes to seafood right off the boat. Valerie and the kids had established a daily routine of going to the beach, a broad stretch of bright white sand populated with a diverse cast of vacationers, from families to fashionistas. I tinkered with boat stuff, and I had plenty to tinker with. It was my new garage.

I mentioned to Valerie that we already seemed to have found our groove. She pointed out that without forward movement it’s not a groove, it’s a hole. This continued until a representative from Lagoon showed up at the dock and told us we had to leave to make room for more boats coming out of the factory.

In the light of the morning sun, I fired up the two 57 horsepower diesel engines, Valerie and the kids unfastened the dock lines, and we slowly worked our way out of the basin of Les Sables. I had been planning this trip my entire life. As a boy, I had spent hours studying maps, drawing and erasing the track I would sail around the world, passing my pencil line through exotic destinations and dreaming of the adventures I would have there. The thought that we were about to sail into this dream made me both giddy and terrified. Available on Amazon Prime More about the voyage

Jim Toomey is an internationally published humor writer and syndicated cartoonist best known as the creator of the popular comic strip Sherman’s Lagoon, published daily in over 150 newspapers, including The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune.

Valerie Toomey moved to the U.S. from her native France twenty-five years ago. Since then, she has worked in international shipping, run a children’s boutique, and for the past ten years worked in the boating industry, currently as a yacht broker for Atlantic Cruising Yachts.