WHERE EAGLES DARE

PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD LANGDON SAILS A HIGH PERFORMANCE WINGSAIL CATAMARAN FROM THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC TO FLORIDA

- RICHARD LANGDON

It was an experience I’ll never forget: blasting downwind across the Northeast Providence Channel, on a deep water passage from New Providence to Chub Cay. We were sailing inside the Bermuda Triangle, just a few hundred miles off the US coast but in a place that is uniquely wild and sparsely populated, fringed by mile upon mile of shallow turquoise waters.

We were not aboard your typical cruising cat. The Eagle Class 53 is a unique carbon catamaran with a hybrid wing and soft sail. It is super light, and super fast, and we took it on an early season northbound sprint from the Caribbean to the USA. The Eagle Class 53 is currently set up with C-foils, but the purpose of our trip was to safely send her on her way up to Bristol, Rhode Island, where the builder, Fast Forward Composites, will shortly be fitting T-foils for full-on flight.

Our trip began when we touched down at the end of our third flight, landing in monsoon rain in Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic. After a hair-raising taxi ride though the thousands of motorbikes and scooters that teem across the city, we wearily arrived at Ocean World Marina on the north coast. My first impressions were that the country (which shares an island with Haiti) is more akin to Cuba than the Caribbean. Rather incongruously, the gleaming Eagle Class 53 awaited us in the marina, surrounded by slightly ageing architecture. Meanwhile, huge swells generated by the strong northerly winds broke over the breakwater.

OFFSHORE DAY SAILER