The next America's Cup will be sailed in 70' catamarans in San Francisco. As a build up to that event,
preliminary events will be sailed as a series called the Americas Cup World Series in 'AC45' (45 ft) catamarans. The boats are being built as one designs here in Auckland and the teams are starting to organize and practice. The World Series regattas will be sailed in different venues around the world. To date, 5 of the 14 or 15 AC45s have been launched and they are based right here in the marina where we are moored. They sail right past us each day.Today was the first day of AC45 practice racing and all 5 boats were on the water. Practice racing not only trains the crews, but gives the race committee a chance to experiment with varying course designs and the media folks a chance to play with all their new high tech gizmos which will attempt to make yacht racing interesting to the masses.
Through some folks we met here in NZ I got a chance to go out on the Coast Guard high speed crash boat for the event. Conditions ranged from relatively light air to 20 – 25kts. We were in the thick of things. Awesome. The acceleration of these boats is unbelievable.
In the final (4th) race it was blowing pretty good and one of the Team Oracle boats buried her bows and rolled over. One support boat put a line on the bow to hold her into the wind and another pulled from the side upright. There was some damage to the wing, but she sailed the 5 miles back to the harbor.
Very cool ..........
Eric
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| Looks like me in our "E" boat days |
