How is this different from the "captive air bubble" ships of fifty years ago?

Or John Thorneycroft's patents in 1877 for trapped bubble craft?

100 year old news...

Why not a wing on water. There will be a small buoyant areas within the water on the sides with propellers or jets. The wing will be covered by solar panels. This is not a ground effect vehicle, the propellers remain under water.

A special thanks to you all for making a point...... STOP REINVENTING THE WHEEL!

I've been thinking that a boat with underwater wings that lift the hull completely out of the water would be the trick. Like a hydroplane but under water. The angle of attack of the wings could be computer controlled so the boat stays at a constant height while the waves wash away under the hull and above the wings so they have essentially no effect. The ride would be smooth. Anyone see any problems with this concept?

Sounds like a more complicated version of the Hickman Sea Sled.
Next this makes the same wake, bow waves as any other boat does.
A far less expensive way to go fast economically is cat and tri hulls, By having an 8-1 beam/length ratio hulls they don't make enough of a bow wave to matter thus keep going faster at far less fuel than any of the mentioned craft.
On my bucket list is a wing in ground effect boat, like a seaplane but only flys just above the water at high eff is how to really go fast.

Hydrofoils do exactly that - and they began doing it well before computer technology moved out of main-frames. See - for example - www.youtube.com/watch?v=759A774qf68

Almost everyone here seems to be missing the point. With a 40% improvement in fuel efficiency, don't you think they would have been implementing this if someone had already come up with it?
The difference between this and a hovercraft or other "air hull" is that the rear skirt is designed to perpetually exhaust air, which is replaced by air being pumped in from the front. This means that the air underneath it is moving at roughly the same speed as the water, resulting in almost no friction between the air/water layer.
The wake is in the same form as, but substantially smaller than with an equivalent sized vehicle. It's maybe displacing a third of the volume of water, so there is less of an issue with the water rushing back in creating waves.
@warren52nz, in your scenario, you would wind up with water friction on the upper side of your blade. While this would, in fact, result in less overall friction than the hull, it would be more friction than if the blade were lifted half out of the water, as with hydrofoils. HOWEVER, that doesn't mean that what you suggest is a bad idea. The result would be an amazingly smooth, wave-resistant ride on water surfaces like lakes that don't have tall wave crests. The pleasure cruise industry considered a design similar to this, but with pontoons under water. That allowed it to ignore waves even when standing still. I believe they had issues with the stability of the design during storm-level waves, but that wouldn't effect what you have in mind.
The real issue is that it would have some serious material strength problems for really big vehicles, and those are the ones that have the biggest fuel efficiency issues.

On a PWC up to a medium sized boat, how about running a turbocharger off the exhaust gases, and then dump all of it into a manifold that is a part of the hull near the bow? Large volumes of gases at low pressure should work just as well as small volumes of air at high pressure. With this system, you'd not be wasting money on expensive air compressors and burning more fuel. It would be win, win, win, win when you consider weight/cost/fuel economy/mechanical complexity considerations. Now watch someone make a gazzillian bucks off this idea.
Randy