C'mon, Hydroptere!

It's hard not to love Hydroptere, Alain Thebault's sizzling fast flying tri. And when they shipped over to the West Coast to take a shot at the transpac record, we had drama in the making.

And then we didn't. Disdaining the weather windows on offer, Hydroptere moved up to San Francisco Bay, where it has been parading around, looking good and getting lots of attention but not doing much of anything. Thankfully, on the weekend Thebault decided Hydroptere better do SOMETHING. So they invented the San Francisco Nautical Mile record and, well, set it.

Nice, right (some beautiful photos here)? Well, sort of. The record they established was a semi-pedestrian

37.5 knots. I know that sounds fast, but the AC 72s will do that easy (heck, even SailRocket does that easy). And Hydroptere's other nautical mile record, set in France, is a world record 50.17 knots. That's a real record at a real speed.

So c'mon Hydroptere, get out there and do something exciting and worthy of your pedigree. Enough with the showboating. Show us what you are really about.

(Can't yet find a video of the "record" run, but the good people at Pressure Drop have thrown together a stop-motion vid made from photos.)