Roger 'Clouds' Badham briefs Barker & Davies on the local weather situation in
San Francisco. Image credit: Chris Cameron/ETNZ
combination of electronic instrumentation and their own instincts. "The data we use to support that comes from studying the racecourse mainly. We are very limited in this Cup in terms of what we are allowed to measure in terms of wind on the water - basically you are only allowed to use publicly accessible outlets for gathering your information and weather data. "We have Clouds [New Zealand meteorologist Roger 'Clouds' Badham] and he's studying the weather here and he is observing what's happening. We talk to him leading up to the start and then pretty much we are on our own after that point. We have a fair understanding on the type of day it is and what the currents are doing and then we just have to use our own eyes." Once they are up and rolling, AC72s predominantly sail way faster than the wind, a factor which when combined with the unique 34th America's Cup courses, Davies said required a new type of strategic thinking. "It's a different type of race - we start upwind and then we set off downwind. So we tend to look downwind to see where the wind is rather than upwind when we are sailing these foiling multihulls. "It's quite a different sensation - we go faster than the wind. If you set off a helium balloon at the top mark we would get to the bottom mark well ahead of it. Even with gybing we are still going faster than the wind so we are always beating the wind down the course, so you sail into pressure all the
July 2013 Image credit: Carlo Borlenghi/Lua Rossa
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