We have just concluded another successful week of training here in Auckland. The weather has given us a little bit of everything, from absolutely beautiful clear days to cold and rain. It is truly a beautiful place, on the good days!The wind has been averaging 15-20 each day, with only an occasional light air day. This has given us the ability to do good testing in breeze, but not much in the light air range. Everything continues to go well for us, with very few setbacks and much valuable sailing time to test.
At this stage of the campaign our focus is on testing, physical fitness, and gathering weather information. Practice and crew training will happen naturally during the course of testing. The testing is necessary for two reasons – to learn some of the unknown systems, which we are testing for the first time, and to squeeze that final 10% in performance from the known systems by making fine adjustments.
Examples of some testing would be mast rake, rudder angle, trim tab angle, and sail crossover points. The rake testing has us adjusting the forestay length to test moving the sail plan forward or backwards over the boat at various degrees, then analyzing the rudder angle and speed to learn how the boat is best balanced. The trim tab is a flap attached to the back of the keel, like the flap on an airplane wing. It is only allowed in America's Cup boats so there is a great deal to learn about this tool which allows you to add more lift to the keel and minimize the sideways sliding which all boats do. And finally the sail testing requires us to tune the mast differently to get different mainsail shapes, and then change genoas and spinnakers in different wind ranges to see where each one begins to be outperformed by the next bigger or smaller one as the wind builds or drops, known as the cross-over points. Although much of this is still learned through feel and sight, we now have precise instruments and computers onboard which measure everything and allow us to review the data to help confirm those times when the boat performed it's best.
During this whole process several of us are dialed in to the wind and weather so that we can become more and more accustomed to the patterns in this region. The Hauraki gulf where we are sailing is a big bay surround by a few islands, making it one large sound with very changing wind and weather patterns. This will make it a very tricky place to sail and predict the wind shifts.
In terms of the other syndicates, the team who has been out almost as much as we have is Team New Zealand, testing their new boat against their '95 boat with a large wing mast. The next most active team is America True who test their new yellow boat against the '95 TAG. New York has only managed two days on the water this past week, spending the rest of the time in their shed fixing some apparent problems. Spain is about one day from launching their boat, which looks very different with a rocked up bow and pretty wide hull.
Hawaii is still a few days away from sailing, their two boats only visible through their shed door. The French and Japanese teams have been seen around but their boats have not arrived as yet. The Swiss boat was flown in on Monday aboard a massive Russian aircraft but is being worked on at a boatyard out of town.
The Viaduct Village is one of the nice things about this cup. The New Zealand Government created this new harbor right in the center of town and each team has leased a site where they construct a boat shed, offices, sail loft, and entertainment area for sponsors. It has created a great atmosphere where the teams are all located in one central place where the public can come, walk around and see all the teams and their boats. It is now only 29 days until the first race of the challenger Series when all these years and millions of dollars in research and testing will be tested against each other.
