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.
By Dr. Robert Dane
Published: March, 2001
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.
When I read this is when it really struck home that maybe boats could use wings both as solar collectors and use them to sail. If it seems fantastic, consider that one hundred and twenty years ago industry depended on sailing ships. For the last hundred and twenty years, we’ve been using fossil fuel motors for industry but it is potentially logical that we will exit this century with totally different technology. Just as the clipper ship captains would have rolled their eyes at the idea of today’s diesel-powered ships, I know many are doubtful about the idea of ships sailing around on solar and wind power. But wind and the sun represent two most abundant forces on the ocean.
So right there on the plane I started drawing pictures of a boat, putting wings on it, and doing a rough calculations. I put the book on the seat in front of me on the plane and then forgot to take it with me when I left the plane. I came back and found the hostess and I tell her, "Look, can I get my book back?" I went through a crazy thing where I thought, "What if the guy cleaning the plane picks up the book, takes a look, figures it out, then goes ahead and patents it."
Well, that didn’t happen but I did spend ten days on board a boat and while vacationing convincing myself that what I was doing was absolutely valid. I went to my wife after the holiday and said, "Look, this is driving me nuts. I think I can win next year’s solar boat race because I can build a better boat. Every doctor my age has a hobby. What about if I spend a little bit of money, darling, and see where this goes?"
She encouraged me so off I went to a patent attorney. I had a partner who had just come into my medical practice. Before too long, one day he walked and I said, "How would you like to buy the whole practice? I want to go and do this solar boat thing."
So I sold my practice and it was in the local paper, that I was off to Sydney to work on a solar boat project. This prompts a call from a lady named Marjorie Kendall. I didn’t know Marjorie but her mother was a patient of mine. Her name was Lilly, lived in a nursing home, and was a ninety nine year old lady who’d sacked every doctor she’d had. One day a nurse said, "We’ve got to have a doctor on the book." So I go and say, "Hello." She snarls, "You young doctors." She’s had mild heart failure, emphysema. You name it, she’s got it. She wouldn’t take any medication for any of them. But she was tough. I would pop in and see here every now and then, more a social chat that I’d use as an excuse to examine her.
Well, Lily’s daughter Marjorie rings me and says, "I read that you’re doing this thing with solar boats." I’m seventy six years old myself and I love solar. I’m solarizing my dairy farm for my children. You’ve got to come out and see my solar pump."
So I get out there and I realize that the solar pump she had was moving and tracking the sun. Also, it was exactly the same size as the wings that I envisioned for the boat that I was planning to enter in April’s race. I’m standing there and there was a pipe with water coming out like a fire hose. It was unbelievable. I’m standing there thinking, "This is going to work."
Marjorie says, "How are you going to get started?" I explain it to her and she says, "Well, where are you going to get the money?" I told here that I was going to try to get some sponsorship. She said, "No you’re not. You’re going to form a company and I’m going to be your first shareholder. How much money do you need?"
Next, I went around and saw my surfboard guy and said, "Can we build wings that have solar panels on them?" He said, "We can do anything. No worries." Then I realized that that’s what he said to everything. If you said, "Can we fly to the moon?", his response would be, "We can do anything!" I guess I was delusionally encouraged by this.
He had a friend who was working in a pub pouring beer, a hobby train enthusiast, who would take a photo of an old locomotive, make a mold, pour the soft metal and make an unbelievable model just from a picture. Between all these guys, we started work on the boat.
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.
It took five years before anyone was interested in what the Wright Brothers were doing. The Army said, "What do we need planes for when we’ve got balloons?" By 2020, the diesel motor will be toast. This whole way along, because I’m a doctor and not an engineer, I’ve always had the approach of "tell me why it won’t work." So far, no one has been able to convince me it won’t.
