We had eighty-two days to build it. The motor was coming from Switzerland and the agent who was supplying it was also competing in the solar boat race. I suspect that he was trying to stop me because the motor didn’t arrive until two weeks before the race. We did all our testing with outboard petrol motors to simulate how the boat was going to go.

It was very stressful. Halfway along we realize our hobby train guy wasn’t going to be able to put together all the panels in time. We put an ad in the paper and that got us Max, who had just quit his job with British Aerospace to become a Buddhist. What he did was elevate us from being just a doctor and a bunch of surfers to doing this at the next level.

We christened the finished boat the Marjorie K. in honor of our patron Marjorie Kendall. Before we had a chance to tell Marjorie, she had a stroke. She was up in the hospital and doing very poorly. The doctors weren’t sure that she would ever recover. I went to see her and said, "We’re called the boat the Marjorie K." Well, she recovered overnight. She’s still firing, comes to all of our functions and still runs the dairy farm.

On the day of the race we solared, did 6.52 knots the whole race and won by a mile. But half way around, we hit the Japanese boat and ended up officially coming in second because we were penalized. All good races are won in the protest room.

But we had a video of our boat just scooting along. I got the number of a famous naval architect, Grahame Parker. I rang him and said, "We’d love to come and see you. We just won this solar boat race. " He said, "Great. Come see me." I said, "Do you reckon it’s going to work on big boats? Will it work or should I go back to medicine?" He said, "It’ll work."

Within a week he’d done drawings of a solar version of a boat very similar to the ferry we’ve got running now in Sydney. I used the drawings to go around town and raise money. We applied for several government grants but didn’t get ‘em. I got a part time job doing drug and alcohol counseling and the rest of the time I was on the phone trying to raise about three million dollars.

Then one Christmas, I was at a party and started talking to this guy, Graham Kelly, the chairman of a company called Novogem, a pharmaceutical company. Graham was a veterinary doctor. He said, "Here’s my card. Come and see me on Monday." This was after more than eighteen months of trying to raise money.

We started construction in June of 1999 and, exactly one year later to the day, we sailed the Sydney Solar Sailor under its own steam in the harbor. It’s being run now by the number one private ferry operator in Sydney called Captain Cook Cruises. It’s running as a corporate entertainment, school educational and excursion boat. It does a highlights cruises just the ferries do here in San Francisco. It hasn’t missed a single day.

It’s costing Captain Cook nothing in fuel to run. It probably uses renewable energy about eighty percent of the time. The other twenty, we burn gas, backup energy. We get the gas for free because the gas company sponsors us, ironically enough. It’s BP, which used to be, as everyone knows, British Petroleum. Now they’re renamed Beyond Petroleum. We’re not using much of their gas, though.

The boat can handle two tons of batteries. We can put seven tons of passengers on this boat, a hundred people, and the boat only slows down half a knot. That’s why solar ferries and boats are possible. The laws of physics allow it. You can’t put seven tons of batteries and people on a bus and expect it to go uphill if it’s got solar power. The power to weight ratio is all wrong. The good thing about boats is that they don’t have to go uphill. They don’t have to stop and start in traffic. They go a constant speed.

I’ve learned a lot hanging around the solar industry these last three years. It’s an embryonic industry and there’s not much money in it, although BP is expecting it to be a $2 billion a year industry by 2007.

Yet I know that this will be the solar century. As a doctor, I feel that it’s insane to be digging these fossil fuels up. What if in three hundred years, we find that petroleum can be used for something else, like to grow skin or bones or use it in plastics in some new way, and we’ve burned it all up? Further, when you burn it, you create toxins.