#acws

Some of the best photos from the weekend's America's Cup World Series racing in Bermuda. After some intense competition, Artemis Racing came away with the overall win. 

What a day! ORACLE TEAM USA led both races from start to finish on day one at the Louis Vuitton America's Cup World Series in Gothenburg, Sweden.

But despite the unblemished record, the team only has a two point lead over former team mate Ben Ainslie.

This past weekend we went to Naples to watch the America’s Cup World Series.

The America’s Cup is a regatta that has taken place every couple of years since 1851. Its name comes from the first yacht to ever have won it - the America. Traditionally it’s a match race, which means only two boats compete, and whichever crosses the finish line first wins.

The current America’s Cup consists of the Cup itself, raced in the San Francisco Bay, and the World Series, which takes place on various locations around the world, one of them being Naples in Italy. For the first time the boats are multi hulls, i.e. catamarans. The cup boats are 72 feet long with a crew of eleven, the World Series is sailed on 45ft boats with five crew members. These boats are of course highly optimized for the race - short ten to twenty minute races around a tiny course located in a protected bay. They wouldn’t be able to deal with a high swell, they have no engine, no belowdecks, no galley and no anchor. You can’t even leave them in the water after the race so they have to be lifted on land every day using one of those cranes normal people use for building houses. One of the main reasons for that is their sail - instead of a flexible sail made of laminate these boats have a solid wing sail that can rotate around the mast but cannot be furled or lowered in any way. Instead after lifting them on land the entire mast/rig is taken off.

On the other hand these racing machines can sail more than 30 knots, and that is what really matters in a race. Seeing them take off (not literally, that’s only for the 72ft versions who have foils) was certainly spectacular.

AC72 flying on foils.

In two days we saw four match races and four fleet races, where the fleet consisted of nine boats racing around the course. Team Oracle 4 won almost every race and the Chinese team very consistently defended their last place.

One observation I found interesting was that while these boats can go very fast, any kind if maneuver is very costly as the boat comes to almost a complete halt and it easily takes 10s until they are up to speed again. In a match race this doesn’t really matter as there’s only one boat to be aware of, but in the fleet race the boats have to think twice before tacking or gybing. One maneuver too many for fighting off one opponent can result in a number of other boats overtaking both of you. While I’m in no way a tactics expert (I do have a couple of years of inshore dinghy racing under my belt) I believe I saw a few occasions where a boat should have tacked but did not. The primary case was where a boat would be in the lead and the boat behind it tacked - normally the leading boat would tack, too in order to stay between the next mark and the other boat. Assuming the boats would have equal speed this way the second boat would never be able to overtake the first one.

The races took place in a bay near the port. After being craned into the water the boats were tied to buoys very close to land which allowed us to watch the crew get set up on board. Every boat sailed along the entire coast line of the bay a few times which gave everyone a god view. I managed to take a few pictures around and during the races using my phone’s camera and binoculars. Start and finish were close, too, although the finish line was next to the area where the boats were lifted, making it a bit hard to see. Apparently you could get access to that area by paying some €350 per day - not exactly the way to bring sailing to the masses. It would have been nice to get really close to the boats and teams on land, but it looks like that’s not what the organizers wanted.