The Florida 300 starts Tuesday, May 17th from Islamorada in the Florida Keys. Race headquarters at the start is the Guy Harvey Outpost Islander Resort.

TheBeachcats.com will be posting stories and pictures each day along the way. The photos will be posted to  the 2016 Florida 300 album at

http://www.thebeachcats.com/pictures?g2_itemId=109100 

Videos will be posted to the Florida 300 Youtube channel

 Also please these Facebook Pages to follow the race.

TheBeachcats.com on Facebook 

 https://www.facebook.com/thebeachcats/

The Florida 300 Facebook Page. 

https://www.facebook.com/sailseries/

Here is a quick list of the start and finish locations, the beach starts and landings can be quite a spectacle so come by and say hi and watch the show, get motivated and join the fun next year! 

Start dates and locations: Starting time is 10:00am.

• Day One Start: Tuesday, May 17, 2016, Islamorada, FL - waters near the Islander resort, MM82.1 US‐1
• Day Two Start: Wednesday, May 18, 2016, Key Biscayne, FL - beach near the Silver Sands Resort
• Day Three Start: Thursday, May 19, 2016, Palm Beach Shores, FL - beach near the Seaspray Inn & Beach Resort 
• Day Four Start: Friday, May 20, 2016, Vero Beach, FL - beach at South Beach Park
• Day Five Start: Saturday 21, 2016, Cocoa Beach, FL - beach near Best Western 

Finish Dates and Locations: Finish times depend on weather and competition, usually between 2pm and 6pm.

• Day One Finish: Tuesday, May 17, 2016, Key Biscayne, FL - beach near the Silver Sands Resort
• Day Two Finish: Wednesday, May 18, 2016, Palm Beach Shores, FL - beach near the Seaspray Inn & Beach Resort 
• Day Three Finish: Thursday, May 19, 2016, Vero Beach, FL - beach at South Beach Park 
• Day Four Finish: Friday, May 20, 2016, Cocoa Beach, FL - beach near Best Western 
• Day Five Finish: Saturday, May 21, 2016, Daytona Beach, FL - beach near The Mayan Inn 

After watching the Americas Cup last year and seeing the big 72 foot cats fly both hulls, many of us daydreamed about flying over the water on our own (smaller) catamarans.

Discuss this subject in the forum. 

But the question was, is it possible? Will the technology "scale down" to the point that some manufacture would be willing to go into production with a fully foiling beach launched catamaran? We now have the first answer to that question with the Flying Phantom from Phantom International of Saint Lunaire, France.

This all-carbon 18x10 (see full specs at end of article) uses an simple yet ingenious set of foiling boards to reach claimed speeds of 30 knots (34 mph) already. These claims are made more believable since during the last Little Americas Cup the foiling C-Class catamaran Groupma C that dominated the competition used the same system and proved to be extremely fast and stable.

Here is the latest report from Phantom about their new flying boat.

FLYING PHANTOM: A ROCKET 2014 START

After a successful launch of the Flying Phantom One Design during the 2013 Paris Boat Show, Phantom International starts this new 2014 year with a high pace to ramp up the activity and prepare the future of the world’s first production foiling catamaran: sailing sessions to test, prepare and optimize the boat; a new website to present products, media and latest news; launch of the production of the first units and preparation of the Dusseldorf Boat Show.

Flashback on these last weeks with Gurvan Bontemps – Flying Phantom Test Pilot

“I’m very happy with the new boat, the one we presented during the Paris Boat Show and that is the first production unit. The last two weeks were dedicated to sailing sessions with the new One Design Flying Phantom. The 4 sailing sessions were very instructive in order to discover the boat: we have new mast, new foils, new sails and the boat is much lighter than the prototype boat.

We continuously optimized the settings and L-shaped foils and T-shaped rudders were validated. We experienced different conditions with a range of wind speeds from 6 to 20 kts including flat water and moderate sea.

The new boat exhibits more stability, as compared to our prototype without any impact on performance, furthermore

NEWPORT, RI, August 28, 2010 -- If wing technology didn’t have everyone’s attention after BMW Oracle Racing’s victorious 33rd America’s Cup, it definitely does now. The high speeds and almost instant acceleration of cambered foils had members of America’s Cup syndicates, top designers, and all sailors in awe. 

Canadian C Class Catamaran Team of Fred Eaton, Magnus Clarke, Steve Killing, Rob Paterson, and Rossi Milev have been along for the entire ride, one way or another. Clarke, Paterson, and Milev took six months off from their C Class program to manage wing protection for the largest wingmast ever built for a race-boat: BMW Oracle’s (223 foot) 68 metre-tall wing. Reunited in March, their team brought four wings to the International C Class Catamaran Championship hosted by New York Yacht Club on Narragansett Bay this past week.

“Upwind the camber is moderate, but downwind with the flap set at 40 degrees, the wing will produce almost double the force of an equal area soft sail,” explains Killing.

Eaton and Clarke raced Killing’s latest design, Canaan, to a thrilling victory today in the final day of match racing. 

NEWPORT, RI, August 27 -- The wind was light and patchy on this first day of match-racing in the International C-Class Catamaran Championship. Canaan, the black cat raced by the Canadian defenders Fred Eaton and Magnus Clarke, was in her element yesterday, winning three of three races. 

Today, was not so smooth. After a significant shift to the south the seabreeze filled in at 12 knots and the third attempt to run a race was a success. More of a success for Alpha however, sailed by Australians, Glenn Ashby and James Spithill.

At the approach to the line Canaan stalled, losing the start and six legs later the first match-race. 1-0 for Australia. In the fleet race designed for the French, British and second Canadian entry, Orion retired. Invictus, of England, crossed the finish line first, and despite powering around the course, just milliseconds after crossing the line Patient Lady VI’s wing tumbled.

NEWPORT, RI, August 26, 2010 -- What a difference a day makes. Today was all Canaan all the time at the International C-Class Catamaran Championship at the New York Yacht Club’s Harbour Court. The stars today were the Canadian defenders Fred Eaton and Magnus Clarke, who won all three races, while Alpha, yesterday’s leader, sailed by Australians Glenn Ashby and James Spithill, finished second in all three races. In point of fact, Canaan has won four straight races, winning the last one on Wednesday.

These two teams will match-race tomorrow and Saturday to determine the winner of the International C-Class Catamaran Trophy in play since 1961. This is the 25th iteration of this regatta.

Missing from today’s racing – indeed the competition – was Aethon, sailed by Steve Clark and his nephew, Oliver Moore. Seconds into yesterday's first start, Moore fell overboard and Clark crash landed into the wing, which unfortunately suffered significant damage. They had to drop out of this much anticipated regatta.

Before today's first race Patient Lady VI had some rigging failure, they were towed in to shore and the crew headed back to the race course to observe in an effort to build their knowledge base of the C Class cats. Orion and Invictus  completed all races, often sailing close, but Orion punctured their wing just before reaching shore.

Yesterday the C-Class Catamaran Aethon capsized after the start of race one of the International C Class Catamaran Championship (long nicknamed the “Little America’s Cup”) and her wing was destroyed. The team hit a patch of turbulence left by a freighter for which they were not prepared and were unable to react in time. Crew Oliver Moore lost his footing and was washed off the boat with the mainsheet wrapped around his leg. As the wing rapidly trimmed in, the boat capsized and helmsman Steve Clark, unable to get out of his trapeze in time, fell through the wing, breaking the mast in the process. Both crew members would be fine, and the platform would suffer only minor damages, but what was left of the wing was all but disintegrated in the three-mile tow back to New York Yacht Club’s Harbor Court.

Click to see horrifying video of the crash!

“The thing I would like to stress here,” said Clark, “is that this was not a product of the conditions. It was a freak accident that could have happened at any time, at any wind speed. If the wing is trimmed all the way to windward and can’t be eased the boat will tip over, and these boats are not designed to do that. It’s a tough end to the last 18 months of work Oliver and I put in, but sometimes these things happen.”

NEWPORT, RI, August 25, 2010 -- The nor’easter departed New England today — more or less — and is off to ruin Canada for a couple of days. Its departure — better late than never — gave the half-dozen winged multihulls sailing in the International C-Class Catamaran Championship at the New York Yacht Club’s Harbour Court a chance to stop talking and start performing. As if they needed any other encouragement.  

Wednesday’s racing took place near Half Way Rock, north of the Pell Bridge, to minimize the remnants of the seas and breeze from the northeast. The wind at the start of the first race was 16 to 20 with puffs pushing it a bit higher. In the first race, Alpha, sailed by Australians Glenn Ashby and James Spithill, had a brilliant port-tack start. It was a shot over the bow. Ashby is an Olympic Silver Medalist and nine-time A-Class, world champion; Spithill was helmsman on BMW Oracle’s wing-sailed trimaran that won the recent 33rd America’s Cup.

Certainly a major story line was the first-leg capsize of Aethon, Steve Clark's and Oliver Moore’s C-Class Cat. This was a new boat for Clark, an American, the absolute prime-mover in the class, who held the International C-Class Catamaran trophy for 11 years, from 1996-2007. Clark has been as important to the class as Tony DiMauro was to the previous generation. These boats motor — on the sunny side of 20 knots — and the disturbed air off a freighter set off a chain reaction that resulted in a capsize and the loss of the wing.

NEWPORT, RI (August 25, 2010) — Six boats and wings are ready to fly, on day two of the 2010 Little America's Cup, aka the International C-Class Catamaran Championship. Instead of racing as planned yesterday, internationally accomplished sailors from five countries played show and tell under the tent at New York Yacht Club. A collection of designers, America’s Cup evaluators and multihull pioneers weren’t too upset that a blustery weather system delayed day one.

One of the most prestigious titles in the world of ultra-high performance sailing, the Championship was last raced in 2007, at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club in Toronto. There, Canadian challenger Fred Eaton and crew Magnus Clarke sailed Alpha to a 5-0 victory over the previously undefeated Steve Clark’s Cogito.

Of the four catamaran divisions, the C-Class is governed by a simple set of rules that reward outside-the-box thinking in aero and hydrodynamics to create the lightest, fastest course-racing boats on the planet.

“All wings under the C-Class rule are the same area of 300 square feet but it can be distributed in any fashion,” shares Steve Killing, the designer for Fred Eaton’s C-Class program. They are propelled not by traditional fabric sails, but by elegant wings, rigid but with twist capability.

Newport, R.I. (August 5, 2010) – Steve Clark has been dreaming of winning back the Little America’s Cup for the USA ever since he lost it to Canada in 2007. In 1996, Clark’s 25- foot C-Class Catamaran Cogito (pronounced with a soft g) had blown away designers and engineers with its mammoth wing sail and unmatchable speed, and with helmsman Duncan MacLane and crew Erich Chase it handily defeated Australia’s defender Edge IV on Port Phillip Bay to win the International C-Class Catamaran Championship, fondly referred to as the Little America’s Cup.

Cogito became and remained the gold standard of C-Class Catamarans for the next eleven years, a place in C-Class cat history to which Clark wishes to return by entering his new boat, Aethon, launched earlier this year, in the 2010 Little America’s Cup, set for August 22-28 off Newport. Clark’s goals for this Cup are oddly reminiscent of what they were for the 1996 event. Clark’s first experience in the C-Class had been in 1985 when he was involved in Patient Lady VI’s unsuccessful defense of the Cup, losing to Australia’s Victoria 150. It was largely this defeat that drove Clark to develop Cogito. Now, his “Cogito Project” is back where it started: testing a new boat and taking aim at winning the Cup back again.

After a tough weekend at the Islander Reef Run, the second race of the Endurance Series hopes to be an easier day on the water with a much shorter course. Gilligan's Run is the shortest course on the Endurance Series schedule. At just under 30 miles, the race starts and ends at the Acapulco Hotel and Resort in Daytona Beach Shores. The course usually runs North to a mark just offshore from the Ocean Deck Restaurant, then South to round a Ponce De Leon Inlet ocean marker buoy, then back north to the start. The weekend is topped off by awards presentation and fish fry at Steve and Cindy Caron's house within walking distance from the Finish line which is always attended by most participants.