This episode is taking you to the high seas with our guest Boris Hermann, the skipper of the IMOCA Team Malizia, currently racing around the world in the Ocean Race 2023.  Yes, it’s a lot about racing sailboats. You’ll discover Boris’s joy and thrills of racing high performance sailing machines around the planet, but it’s also a lot about the future of maritime transportation.  Because, it’s now an evidence that offshore racing is an engine for innovations. Just like the America’s Cup, Formula One or Nascar. Boris will guide you through the pathways between his sport and the develop ..read more

This week's episode brings us down memory lane.  Our guest on March 31st, 2021 was Roger Strevens,  VP Global Sustainability at Wallenius Wilhelmsen. Roger shared with us the design and feasibility assessment of the Orcelle Wind, the car carrier that will be powered primarily by wind, killing emissions by up to 90% in comparison to other new-built ships.  Today, Kat Bride is catching up with Niclas Dahl, managing director of Oceanbird: the Swedish company (joint venture of Alfa Laval and Wallenius) develops and provides technology for wind-powered vessel propulsion. The Oceanb ..read more

We are thrilled to introduce our two new guests. They met on a boat and decided to start a shipping company. They both are committed to succeed on their mission, helped by their passion and their business acumen. One is an accomplished athlete, a sailor whose credentials are world-renowned. The other is an engineer who has worked with success in the automobile industry. Together, with three other partners, they launched VELA Transport. François Gabart and Michael Fernandez-Ferri are our guests and we couldn’t be more proud.  François competes on the ocean with his state-of-the-art SVR La ..read more

This episode of Hoisting the Sail begins with the wish of a sail racer who yearned to pilot a flying sailboat above the water and win every race.  In 1987, legendary sailor Éric Tabarly famously proclaimed that “one day, all boats will fly.” Today’s guest, Richard Forest, CEO and co-founder of SEair, diligently leads a team of engineers to prove Tabarly was right!  Founded in 2016 and based in Lorient, France, SEair rose above the competition to become the global specialist for hydrofoil vessels.  If wind propulsion can drastically reduce CO2 emissions from cargo ships, foilin ..read more

This new episode of Hoisting the Sail is taking you to Barcelona! Our guest is David Ferrer Desclaux, co-founder & CTO of bound4blue. A trained aerospace engineer, he switched to the vast horizon of our blue planet in 2015 and started, along with a group of classmates, bound4blue, “to power the world with wind”. Bound4Blue is developing an automated wind-assisted propulsion system, the eSAIL. If you grew up watching Commandant Jacques Cousteau adventures on TV, you may remember his 2nd boat, the Alcyone. Commandant Cousteau’s team included two bright engineers, Professor Lucien Malavard ..read more

Our guest today is Dr Christiaan De Beukelaer, a senior lecturer in culture and climate at the University of Melbourne.  Christiaan and Kat discuss in details Trade Winds, a voyage to a sustainable future for shipping,  Christiaan's first book to be released in January. Writing this book was a journey : it started in Sydney where Christiaan learned how to sail to escape from his  desk, then continued in Santa Cruz de Tenerife where he embarked on the schooner Avontuur, operated by Timbercoast. He was going to disembark in Guadeloupe. But it was February 2020, and while sailin ..read more

In this episode,  you are in for a treat with our guest Daniel Hubbell.  We first met Dan around a glass of wine and a bar of chocolate aboard Grain de Sail last spring in Brooklyn and interviewed him in October when he was the Shipping Emission Campaign Manager for Ocean Conservancy (since the interview, Dan started a new position as Policy Analyst at U.S. Department of State)  Daniel Hubbell takes us on a tour of the International Maritime Organization where he spent a few years of his  career advocating for Ocean Conservancy.   Thanks to Daniel insight, you will le ..read more

In this new episode, we are thrilled to receive Nicolas Abiven. Nicolas is a Senior Engineer at the Chantiers de l’Atlantique, the shipyard in Saint Nazaire, France. The 150 years old shipyard has launched some of the most iconic vessels, such as the Normandie, the Queen Mary 2 and the Splendor of the Sea to name a few.  After launching a first concept ship equipped of sails, Eoseas, in 2009, les Chantiers have been developing a type of sails suitable for large cruise ships and for commercial ships. From this intensive research was born Solid Sail, a large, rigid sail made of composite ..read more

We launch today Season 3 with an interview of Clare Newman, the president and CEO of  the Trust for Governors Island.  Kat and Clare discuss many facets of sustainability and adaptability - New York City since Sandy, the current and future developments on Governors Island, its maritime facade and the many experiments that can be run from the Island. Governors Island, located South of Manhattan and East of the Statue of Liberty, was originally used by the Lenape as a hunting  & fishing camp, before becoming an US Army base then, from 1966 to the mid 90s, a base for 3,000 US ..read more

In this new episode of Hoisting the Sail, we are delighted to welcome two guests from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute:  Kerry Ann Crehan-Strøm, the Marine Operations Coordinator for WHOI and Magdalena Andres, associate scientist physical oceanography and an expert on climate variability & impacts. Magdalena and Kerry are speaking with our host Kat about Science RoCS, i.e. Research on Commercial Ships, an initiative launched to answer the need for increased ocean monitoring. According to NOAA, 80% of the ocean is still unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored:  Science RoCs ai ..read more