battling it out for the spoon. Tough but being humbled can never hurt! Although there were elements leading up to this event that were
less then pleasant it had absolutely nothing to do with the people charged with looking after our team while we were there. As I said, the Saudi organisers and all involved were incredibly kind. As a team we were very grateful to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the support they gave to us as we navigated through a safe and secure event. With Jeddah and 2023 behind us, I am going to start the new
year out right and practise what I preach: do the talking on the water. Happy New Year to all, standing by Barcelona, Spain!
SOMETHING TO STUDY – Jack Griffin Thank heavens for the Recon Programme The second Preliminary Regatta in the build-up to the 2024 America’s Cup in Barcelona provided some good racing but also a clear demon- stration of what to expect when racing takes place at the low end of the wind range. As usual, foiling is faster than floating! The lower wind limit is 6.5kt – probably about 2kt too low. When
the wind is that light there are likely to be patches that are even lighter, and woe unto the team that needs to sail back and forth to try to get airborne after falling off their foils. When foiling the AC40s need about 26kt of boat speed to pull off a dry tack. In Jeddah Emirates Team New Zealand put on a textbook demonstration, winning five of the eight fleet races before sealing the regatta win in the match race final against Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli. The Kiwis had Pete Burling and Nathan Outteridge on the helms.
Outteridge won the 49er gold medal at the London Games with Burling getting the silver. In 2016 in Rio they traded places on the podium. The golden former rivals and training partners make ETNZ a tough team to beat. The Italians turned their boat over to Ruggero Tita, 2020 Nacra
17 gold medalist and the dominant force in the class, and 19-year- old Marco Gradoni. Gradoni is the only sailor ever to win three Optimist
world titles. They won the other three fleet races and were mixing it up with the Kiwis in the match race final until the last windward rounding. In the bearaway they got too high, lost the rudder and nosedived, filling both cockpits to the gunwales and ending their race. Despite the wet ending to their regatta in Jeddah Luna Rossa will probably be one of the favourites for the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger selection series in Barcelona. We won’t see any more racing until late August. The launches of
the AC75s will provide our next wave of excitement. The Joint Recon- naissance Programme has brought a dramatic change from past years, when all the teams would attempt to spy on each other and the public was left largely in the dark. The America’s Cup tradition of spying and public curiosity goes
all the way back to 1887 and GL Watson’s Thistle. Designed for James Bell’s challenge from the Royal Clyde Yacht Club, Thistlewas built in secrecy and shrouded in canvas at her launch on Tuesday 26 April 1887, just like Australia II almost 100 years later. When she arrived at Tompkinsville on Staten Island in New York Harbor enterprising boatmen charged up to $3 to row gawkers around the mysterious Scottish yacht. The publisher of New York’s The World hired a diver to take measurements one night. The newspaper then produced a drawing that was later proven to be wildly inaccurate. James Gordon Bennett (the same), owner of rival newspaper The
Herald, obtained a set of drawings from a skilled draughtsman who had seen Thistle out of the water in Scotland. Bennett showed the drawings to Watson, who was taken aback at their accuracy. As Thistlewas to be hauled two days later for measurement there was no longer a need for secrecy and owner Bell gave Bennett permission to publish the drawings. The Joint Reconnaissance Programme for the 2024 America’s
Cup serves two purposes. It provides a supply of photos and video for publication, to satisfy public interest; and it obviates the need for each team to chase their competitors around with telephoto lenses. The two-person ‘Recon Units’, one per team, provide a standard
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