My initial thoughts- what a load of bollocks.

Maybe finian and others should make up websites with outlandish claims, hell nebbian even you could do it. Cmon no one has touched 50knots apart from fin and they are claiming 100 . People have been trying to hit 30, 40 and now 50 for over 30 years in some wacky craft and I dont see this as anything radically different. Any that have tried should take this as an insult.

Secondly look at their time frame, within a few months they are going to take several world records. Within 8 months they are going to assemble the craft, learn to drive the damn thing and punt it over 50knots. Compare this with the time frame of something like MI or even finian/bjorns simple already made, assembled, ridden and proven craft.

So to me it goes something like this-
quit job, get sponsored by government- decide i'm gonna break 150knots on a (revolutionary) sailboard.
get a few like minded people (hopefully some with some sort of relevant qualification).
make a website to suck in all kinds of stupid people with lots of money, include a few more outlandish claims and unrealistic itinery.
build a model, when model achieves 10km/h point out speed is proportional to boat scale.
build sailboard.
go sailing, continue to be optimistic when sailboard crashes or fails to come close to current record.
walk away with lots of money.

After a bit of consideration i stand by my initial thoughts. I'll add to that though, i am gonna have a celebratory beer when this thing crashes or fails miserably. 50 knots?- sailboards first soon after kites.

The whole project would have credibility to me if they first claimed to break the world sailing record, then after that they can claim whatever they want. Compare that site and the claims made to one that already have runs on the board- http://www.macquarie.com.au/speedsailing.htm

I'm not being pessimistic, there just seems to be alot of ideas coming out- most talk themselves up bigtime, most cost lots of money which could be put to better things and most fail to even break 40 knots. Pump the money or time that these things use into a sailboard or kite and 50 knots will be history.

And no the first sailboard made perfect sense.

hydrofoily stuff isn't mainstream even though it's been bandied around for decades.

promises, promises.

i'll dig up a forefin nebs.

Nah. Nothing that ugly can go as fast as they claim. There's a rarely cited law of physics, Mikey's Law I believe, that says if it doesn't appeal to the eye, or if it's not red, it won't go fast.

yes- stripes will increase speed by 14.72%

i can validate knot boars theory,

my red board goes really really fast.

OK, Daniel, OK, I was being facetious about the colour thing. Mikey's Law doesn't really say that it must be red to go fast. And I'm sorry to have called your baby ugly, but... Although if it goes as fast as you predict, who gives a rat's what it looks like. It will all be a blur at that speed!
But I was being serious about the aesthetic qualities, and I would invite your comment. At the risk of sounding like an arts student (which I'm not) there's something about elegantly simple design that intuitively seems more credible than complicated, less aethetically pleasing design. Sure, the visual simplicity may belie the complicated engineering below the surface, but my gut tells me that, particularly for aero or hydrodynamic engineering, elegant, clean lines work better than cluttered lines. There are many examples of this in nature, for example, the wing plan and profile of a soaring bird, or the sleek body shape of a fast swimming fish like a tuna or a marlin. They look fast, even when they are motionless. The same goes for the $250,000 Mercedes parked in the basement of our building. It looks like it is going at a thousand miles an hour when it's parked! There's even some kind of elegant simplicity about Finian barrelling down the trench with only a few thousand dollars worth of equipment beneath him. I would compare the lines of his sail, fin and board, which are clean and uncomplicated, to a "design of nature" rather than a design of man. Of course his gear is a manmade design, but it, and even something like Yellow Pages, has (or had with YP) an elegant simplicity.
So, as an engineer, do you think there is anything to Mikey's Law, or is it a crock? How will your team's design, which appears to have disjunctive parts in different places for different purposes, rather than an overall elegant simplicity, succeed. I challenge you to prove me wrong, but hell, I'll be the first to congratulate you if you do! Cheers