"Tacking is exactly the same, communicating to everybody what’s happening, doing all the preparation, putting the boards in the right places and having everybody in the right places to swap the wing sheets, to drop or raise the boards or pop the oil that is required. "I’ve always been a feel sailor, but in the AC72 there is a lot more use of instruments required. It is really easy to sail the boat downwind too hard, too fast, too high with the foiling, so it’s about getting a really good balance. "In the AC72 there is less feel trough the boat then any of the boats that I have sailed before [Draper is a 49er Olympic medallist] but that is developing the more we sail. The big thing is that when sailing with a big group of people there is lot of operations that need to happen in order to do a manoeuvre,
this requires a lot of time and if I don’t communicate in
advance it’s tricky for everybody." "So in the end, all the maneuvers really come down to timing, and making sure that everybody gets enough warning," Draper summarised. "The communication is almost exactly the same as racing in the AC45: what’s coming next, what the plan is going to be, what the next plan might be and basically just all the timings for the manoeuvres. Everybody is very automatic but everybody needs a key of information as a trigger for what to do." Bruni agreed that the gybing rather than the tacking angles were the most tricky to get right.
24 Image credit: ACEA / Giles Martin Raget.
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