Eric Bretscher holds a PhD in Engineering Science from the University of Auckland, a Masters in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland, and a Diploma in Project Management from the Australian Institute of Management. He has a background in heavy industrial engineering and process control. He taught all aspects of coastal and offshore sailing and navigation at the well-known French sailing school Les Glénans in the early 1990s and later set out alone on board the sloop Yarra for 7 years, covering some 55,000NM between latitudes north of the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic, including many mythical locations such as Iceland, Patagonia, Easter Island, the fog-bound Aleutian Islands, Alaska, Tasmania and many more with a sextant, depth sounder, speed log and a stack of paper documents. He has been involved with marine engineering, projects and the propulsion of commercial crafts since 1997. He designed a number of pleasure crafts and commercial vessels since and personally built the 43' alloy sloop Nordkyn launched in 2010. He has recently been performing parametric shape optimisation on full hulls using free-surface viscous flow computations on supercomputing clusters.