Hydrofoil Pleasure Boats
Hydrofoils can certainly benefit fast pleasure boats (moving in planing regime). They reduce required engine power nearly twice (at the same speed) and improve seaworthiness in moderate waves. An example of a Russian-built hydrofoil boat and a comaprison of miles that can be travelled per gallon of fuel is shown below. One can see that a hydrofoil is much better than common pleasure boats os similar sizes. Hydrofoils systems can be made retractable (such systems have been already built), so hydrofoils will not create additional problems with launching, docking, repair, coming onto beach, etc. Thousands of hydrofoil pleasure boats were built and are in operation in Russia.
As concerns the prospects of introducing this technology in the USA, I am currently sceptical about it. Boat owners do not particularly care about fuel consumption (although they may say the opposite). High-speed operations seem to take a small fraction of the total sailing time. So both boat owners and boat production companies in the USA are not really interested in this technology.
