[MHml] (no subject)

[Chris Ostlind]

Hi Roy,

Since nobody else has a taken on this topic...

The Rave came out of the kayak industry. The parent company of Windrider sailing boats was Confluence Watersports which also owned Wilderness Systems kayaks, Wavesport whitewater boats, Mad River Canoe and Harmony Accessories. They now also own Perception kayaks, Dagger kayaks, Adventure Technology paddles and a generic brand, Mainstream.

The Confluence brand emerged when Wilderness Systems acquired/developed the initial brand companies as shown above. They then developed Windrider as a sailing extension to their overall corporate line so they could make a move into sailing at the car-toppable/small trailer level. 

Windrider first emerged with the Jim Brown designed Windrider 16, (very fun boat, by the way) that was followed by the Windrider 10 which was designed by Mark Balogh. There was a conscious decision to hook-up with Dr. Bradfield to develop the Windrider Rave product. The Rave established Windrider as a technologically driven company within the over all Confluence umbrella.

I suspect that the Rave was purely developed to make the Confluence brand more attractive to an investor group and had only a small amount to do with actually getting a production foiling multihull out on the market, where it could truly generate sales and a following.

Windrider went on to develop the Windrider 17 in concert with Jim Brown (again) and proceeded to market that boat with some degree of gusto in the marketplace. At the same time, the Rave was slowly dwindling away as sales were on the slow side and there was not the type of corporate support that would, or could, make the difference. 

The company was acquired by investors who had made a killing in the stock market and probably thought it very cool to own a kayak business. They knew virtually nothing about the business of boating, or the psychology, of small craft boaters and how they went about making their purchases. 

There was a huge shift in the kayak/canoe/whitewater market at the same time, as several really huge companies emerged to, (Watermark and Johnson Outdoors) more or less, control the market.. save for the much smaller, non-acquired firms, still catering to aligned issues of paddler response, customer service and non-leveraged dealings with the shops that carried their brands.

In all this big business BS, the Rave product got totally lost and slipped away into ignominy, just as the, now discontinued, Hobie Trifoiler did. Too complex a boat, too much hassle at the launch site, too narrow of a bandwidth for really nasty sailing speeds, etc. Just too many too's to make for a great boat. The Trifoiler may have suffered from other issues and if Greg Ketterman reads this list, perhaps he can illuminate the process.

I've sailed both the Trifoiler and the Rave in San Pedro, California's Hurricane Gulch and found them to be wonderful machines... when in their element. They really like smooth, more or less protected waters, with a steady, potent breeze to light-up their potential. Both boats can really haul-ass in those conditions and can generate certifiable, neck warping G-forces in turns, as well as flat-out straight-line velocity that smokes the fastest of beach cats, regardless of size. Both of these boats have clocked in the mid, thirty knot region in the right conditions and are, without a doubt, true high performers on a reasonable budget. There just aren't many sailors who find the whole, ultra-performance deal, all that compelling. And so, they died.

I see the Moth foilers as being a part of that same paradigm. Sure, they can bring it in the hands of a tuned and talented sailor, but they also have to be fiddled with to launch, cost a bundle for what you get and if they break, how long does it take to get the parts to get that bad boy back on track?

The Rave sorted through many of these same negative issues several years ago and there aren't really any good solutions in the works since then. You want to go hyper-fast, then expect to hyper-fiddle to get there. Such have been the rules for all really fast vehicles (of any kind) since day one.

Others may have their own take on all this, but that's mine.

Chris
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