A brand new Moth will be racing around our shores on its foils this summer.
At the helm will be 19-year-old Sean Herbert of Manly, honing his skills with an eye towards a career in high performance sailing.
The Moth is fast, and it’s the top class for single handed foiling, popular with competitive sailors.
Sean is excited about the summer ahead as his Moth is currently being built and should be ready just as his university studies wrap up for the year.
He has already made his name in a wide range of classes of boat, including the Starling, the RS Feva (with his sister Imogen) and Waszp.
His success in all of these earned him a Youth Performance Award at this year’s Yachting NZ Excellence awards. It’s the second time he’s taken out the award – the last was in 2017.
With Imogen, he won two RS Feva open national titles in the past 12 months, came out on top at this year’s Waszp nationals and also finished first, winning every race, in the Waszp at the Foil event in the Bay of Islands. He finished 4th with Joshua Bull in a largely unfamiliar boat at the 29er nationals among a strong fleet that included five Australian crews.
Sean says the award is gratifying as a lot of hard work goes into those performances.
He is studying electrical engineering, but says the dream is to reach the pinnacle of foiling and compete in the Olympics and America’s Cup.
Gone are his days of sitting in a dinghy – he says the first time he got up on foils, in a Waszp, it was a rush.
“The feeling of flying is second to none,” he says. “There’s no doubt the future is foiling – once you’ve done that, everything else feels slower.”
