Producer's Notes: Ugo Conti's Spider Boat

Chris Bauer Post on May 12, 2008 by
Topics: Engineering, Television
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I first met Ugo Conti a number of years ago when we discussed an inflatable boat he had designed to sail from the San Francisco Bay to Hawaii. This adventure was born from Conti's passion for the sea and was somewhat of a follow up to the round-the-world sailing adventures he took with his young family decades before. I think it takes someone with a lot of self-assuredness to quit their job, buy a sail boat, load up their family, and sail off into the big blue with relatively limited sailing experience.

The funny thing is, Mr. Conti actually claims to be a "coward." He even named that first boat "Phobos" after the god of fear. He quickly adds, though, that the fear he felt was actually one of the things that kept him safe. He approached sailing around the world from the perspective of an engineer… and then he over-engineered the situation to be doubly or triply safe. As Mr. Conti told me, "If you go at sea, and with other things in life too, either you are an expert, or you're scared. If you are both, it's even better. If you're not one of those two, any sailing endeavor becomes very dangerous. If you're scared, or you're so worried about everything, then you're very careful. And so you can go into difficult situations because you are careful. If you're not scared and you're not an expert, if you go to sea you'll get clobbered, and maybe even die." He continued, "but by going through that, you face, but not conquer, fear. They say it's a courageous person that goes on despite the fear, not somebody that is not fearful. Because that person is an idiot."

I have been lucky to meet many unconventional thinkers who have changed the world by "thinking outside the box." That term has become a cliché. But when I spoke with Mr. Conti, I saw a person who has never seen "the box." It seems as though each of his projects starts with a clean slate and he borrows little from collective engineering standards. He designs boats but does not claim to be a marine engineer. One thing he told me that I found very interesting was how someday "someone is going to invent a powerful engine, something that runs on water, air or some unlimited resource and makes no pollution. This will kill the combustion engine and every car, boat, train, airplane and power-plant will be generating power in a completely clean way. The person who invents that machine will not be someone from the car industry or anyone who studied combustion engines or conventional engineering." True groundbreaking progress comes from outsiders who don’t follow the pack.

Watch the "Ugo Conti's Spider Boat" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Chris Bauer is a Segment Producer for television on QUEST.


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  • Andy

    As a marine tech geek I was quite excited to find out more about this spider boat. I've followed other technologies with great interest such as hydroplanes, multihulls, wave-piercing hulls, etc.

    This reporting was a great disappointment though. While it repeated claimed breakthroughs in wave handling adaptivity, video clip after clip showed the spider trolling around on smooth flat water.

    I'll admit that this is true mariner tradition – boat photos, especially advertisements for boat sales – are notorious for showing boats racing along in solely flat water, as if that is the norm in the ocean or bay.

    This news spot was the marine equivalent to a report on breakthrough snow traction technology featuring solely clips of a car driving around a parking lot in Arizona summer.

    Why did I bother watching this? I am confident you could do better.

  • Chris Bauer

    We obviously would have loved the opportunity to take the Proteus out onto the open ocean to see (and show) how she handled in rough seas. Alas, at the time of production, the chance to take her out in big water could not be given to us. We can’t always get what we want. So we had to make due with only seeing her navigate the San Francisco Bay and New York Harbor. Even then, I still thought it was pretty cool.

  • Joan Johnson

    I was the Associate Producer on this Quest piece and I can answer the question about Proteus sea trials based on my last conversation with Ugo and his wife Isabella.

    There have been several comments about Proteus being filmed in calm waters and inside the bay. This doesn’t mean that Proteus has never been outside the Golden Gate. In fact she has done over 3,000 miles of open ocean cruising, some of that in pretty nasty weather. She has even gone over the Columbia River shoals in Oregon without any trouble, to the great surprise of the locals.

    As for flipping over, as a few of these readers seem to be concerned about, the answer is: any power boat can capsize. Sailing catamarans can and do capsize because of wind pressure on the sails and because the hulls tend to dig under the waves. WAM-V's are not sailboats, are very wide relative to conventional power catamarans and, because the hulls of a WAM-V are round and soft, they don’t “catch” under a wave. Instead they pop right out. If you have ever tried to flip over a rubber dinghy, you know what I’m talking about: they keep sliding out and insist on staying right side up.

    WAM-Vs are ultra light vessels and in a heavy sea they behave more like a cork, sliding on top of waves as opposed to digging in.

  • http://none Franklin Samraj

    Dear Friend

    Fine Invention. I would like to adapt this for large ferry networks for tourists transports across big rivers like Hudson New York , or Hoogly in Calcutta. This would give 360 degrees visibility and vertical high visibility.

    Surely all can be spiderman in this spiderboat.

    Franklin Samraj
    Spicer College Pune India