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Here Comes the Sun

Bay Crossings sat down with the inventor of the world’s first solar ferry to get the story of how he went from country doctor to solar entrepreneur. Here, in his own words, is his story.

By Dr. Robert Dane

Before all this started, I was practicing as a country doctor about three hours south of Sydney on the coast in a town called Ulladulla, which in aboriginal means safe harbor. It boasts a very big fishing industry and a very safe port. It’s the place where a lot of the people sailing from Sydney to Hobart pull in if they get in trouble.

I always wanted to be a country doctor. I also loved sailing. I wanted to do obstetrics and anesthetics in a country hospital setting so that’s what I trained to do. After 10 years of school and training in the hospitals in New South Wales I got into practice with this old Scotsman. I learned a lot of things from him about life and medicine and when he ceased operating I was the only doctor. It was very stressful but very satisfying and rewarding, too.

While there, I bought a couple of sailboards from the local Alludalla surfboard manufacturer, Bruce Heggie. Bruce pioneered light fiberglass surfboard technology. I love sailboarding and I love surfing. I met people who are totally different than what I met doing medicine, people who work with their hands.

The sea is in my blood. My uncle was a sea captain, ran a boat down to King Island called the King Islander. My great, great, great, great, great grandfather was a guy called Captain Woodhouse who used to sail clipper ships out to Australia.

All I’ve studied to do all my life is medicine but I finished up loving the sea. So here I am in this little country town, practicing medicine, great life, earning lots of money. And then one day back in 1996, I happened to be standing on the banks of the Burly Griffin, a man made lake. Every year they have this solar boat race there.

I’m standing there with my fair skin thinking, "Here’s the solar boat races. There’s all this energy in the sun. I’m a mad sailor. What about mixing the two?" So I’m standing there watching these boffins (editor’s note: Australian for nerd), about forty entrants in all. In my opinion they didn’t understand boats but rather what they were doing is applying solar car energy to boats, what I call the tennis court theory of solar boats where you basically put a flat area of solar panels and you sit underneath it. The problem with just having a boat covered in solar panels is that you can’t angle your panels to the sun. I just knew that if you angled your panels to the sun, you’d increase the amount of energy.

My family and I watched it all for a couple hours. The band is playing and my kids are saying, "Come on, Dad, let’s go." Half way through the race the wind picked up and people started taking the solar panels off their boats because of the wind.

I’m not an engineer. I haven’t invented anything. But I did figure out that a solar sailing vessel has to be able to sail in the sun and sail in the wind. I knew it in my head and in my heart.

So with this in mind I developed the criteria for a solar sailing vessel. It had to be seaworthy. It had to use existing technology. It had to use the wind and the sun. And then — I went back to my medicine.

But all the while I kept thinking. There are a whole lot of reasons why solar boats make sense. It’s much easier to carry batteries on a boat. Plus there’s more reflected light out on the water. In fact, the first day that we took our solar sailor out on Sydney Harbor we blew every fuse on the boat.

Then one morning I wake up at four o’clock in the morning and bing!, the answer came to me: solar wings, basically a wingsail that is pivotally mounted? I remember thinking, "When the storms come, you can fold the wings down onto the roof of the boat like a beetle. Then the wind could go over the top and it would still collect solar energy."

I found in my bookshelf of medical books a book on evolution. The fundamental difference between the creationists and the evolutionists is that the creationists maintain that God made all the animals. Period. Evolutionists say they evolved. The creationist’s argument against evolution focuses on the eye, no pun intended. They ask, what good is half an eye? What good is an eye before you can use it see?

The answer is that you can track the sun. The other argument that creationists put forward is what good is half a wing? How do you evolve a wing? The evolutionists come along and say it was used for something else before it was used to fly. For example, larger animals used wings for gliding. They crawled up to the top of a tree where they could glide off. This evolved into flying.

The moment that changed my life was when I was reading on an airplane on my way to a vacation on Whit Sundays, a cruising area for yachts. My book was explaining that ninety percent of the species on this earth are insects and, further, that ninety percent of insects fly. I was fascinated to learn that insects initially evolved wings as solar collectors and only thereafter used them to fly.