06/28/2023
🏅🚤⚡️💪
Congratulations to the Washington College Electric Boat Team for yesterday’s 2nd and 4th place the Promoting Electric Propulsion national competition! This was no small feat!
Last summer we modified our marathon design electric boat to compete at PEP in their collegiate electric boat 5-mile sprint competition and took the 16 competitors by surprise when we left with first place.
In the past 9 months, our team has worked tirelessly to construct a new hull, build an integral 144v 43kWh lithium battery, and build a 42kW outboard motor (about 57HP). We took these two boats to Norfolk to compete yesterday with the now expanded 27 collegiate teams.
Just to make it on site with a functional boat is a huge feat. Some universities opted not to make the long journey to the race since their boats still had issues to resolve. Other teams, like University of Michigan and Princeton University, brought multiple boats.
Cole Davis ‘26 skippered our existing 18’ wood-hulled runabout (powered by a custom 48v 14kWh LiFePO4 battery spinning a custom 5kW motor). Cole took 4th place overall in the manned competitions!
Douglas Hewes ‘26 skippered our new 23’ carbon fiber and fiberglass trimaran. In the final manned heat of the day, Douglas managed to edge out the competition and took 1st place, beating all previous records by any other college to date!
Princeton ran their hydrofoils earlier in the day and had to be towed in after breakdowns to their fast but delicate systems. There was a surprise (unscheduled) 2nd attempt by Princeton, the only team to be given multiple opportunities to re-run the same boats, including the large hydroplane they converted to electric with the help of their Flux Marine sponsor’s proprietary motor systems. They managed to keep it together this time and took back first place topping out at over 70mph!
Regardless of the controversial conclusion, Washington College did an AMAZING job. Our boats were clearly the best combination of speed and reliability, and what the competitors don’t realize is that we finished the races with 80% of our battery remaining (since we deigned to be able to do marathons racing as well).
Please join me in congratulating the entire team and recognizing the combined hundreds of hours of hard work that led us to our victory.
🎯 Our students aren’t just jumping in a boat and hammering a throttle to win a race. The team designed and built all the custom systems, including a new unique trimaran hull, giving them an invaluable experiential intersection between the theoretical and practical aspects surrounding naval achitecfure and marine electric propulsion systems.
Let me reiterate this in the most clear terms… Comparatively, with 27 colleges and universities representing, some having upwards of 75 undergraduate and graduate students on a team with seemingly limitless resources, our small yet mighty high performance team is most definitely making waves as we remain at the top of the standings for the second year!
http://wacelectricboat.com
