48 SMITHSONIAN | April 2020
in New Zealand to a mother who owned a travel agency and
a father who researched dairy cow genetics, Hayman start-
ed messing around with boats early: In the summertime, his
parents parked him at a local sailing club. He left college as a
freshman when his uncle asked him to deliver a sailboat part-
way up the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island. “After
that I was hooked,” Hayman says.
He worked on boats all over the world, including Antarc-
tica. He developed and built racing
boats in the Bahamas, where he also
converted America’s Cup yachts to
racing charters and operated a fer-
ry business. But he realized that if
he didn’t want to spend his entire
life sanding fi berglass and humping
sails up and down decks, he needed
a college degree. At age 25, Hayman
went ashore in England to study naval architecture at New-
castle University, then earned a master’s in engineering for
sustainable development at the University of Cambridge.
Soon he was working on fl oating production tankers, design-
ing heavy-lifting equipment for the oil and gas industry, and
doing marine salvage.
“Things that fl oat need a naval architect,” Hayman says. One
calls in a naval architect to safely lower large objects to the sea-
bed, and to lift foundered vessels without
breaking them up, he explains. In 2011,
Hayman found himself in a helicopter
speeding over the Borneo rainforest. He’d
been dispatched to the region to extract
a cargo ship grounded off Samarinda.
A horrifying glimpse out the helicopter
window changed the course of his life.
“I saw thousands of acres of bulldozed
tropical rainforest, and I asked the pilot
what was going on,” Hayman recalls. “He
said they’d been extracting coal from the
area for fi ve years. And I thought, Wow,
that’s so much destruction in such a short
amount of time.” Coal fi lled the hold of
the ship he was about to rescue.
Wouldn’t it be better, he thought, to
generate carbon-free energy from the
movement of the sea than to dig it from
the earth? One could avoid both the dan-
gerous transport of fossil fuels and the
outsize environmental impacts of ex-
tracting as well as burning them. “Peo-
ple are fi xated on greenhouse gas emis-
sions,” Hayman says, referring to the
back end of a linear process. “But they
are unaware of what it takes to generate
energy up front.” After resurrecting the
ship in Borneo, Hayman devoted him-
self to generating power from tides.
Most of us understand, on a basic lev-
el, that tides rise and fall in response to
the Moon and the Sun’s gravitational
pull on the oceans. But the nuances of
tides are fantastically complex, and they
remain slightly mysterious even to the
learned. Tidal idiosyncrasies abound:
Some places, like the Gulf of Mexico, see
one high tide a day, instead of the more
usual two, while others see four. As Jon-The nuances of tides are
fantastically complex, and
they remain slightly mysterious
even to the learned.