Sail-World New Zealand- February 21, 2013

by . on 22 Feb 2013 Welcome to Sail-World.com's New Zealand newsletter for February 21, 2013

The JJ Giltinan Trophy for 18ft skiffs continues in Sydney Harbour, with Race 5 being completed yesterday afternoon.

This is the premier regatta in the 18ft skiff world - and doubly of interest because it is being staged in the home of 18ft skiff sailing - Sydney Harbour.

The event is a mix of the bleeding edge in monohull sailing technology, and the tradition of the fastest monohull sailing class in the world.

On the water you have the wing masts, and rotating rigs. Off the water the traditions of betting on races from on board the ferries which follow the racing. The bookies might not be dressed in bad suits and wearing dark trilbies anymore, but you can still have a flutter on the ferry.

For New Zealand Alex Vallings on C-Tech is still the best performed, despite a collision with 2012 Olympic Gold Medalist, Malcolm Page at the top end of the first beat yesterday. Not sure whether Vallings got redress from the incident, but from what we could see, he should have done so.

You can follow the racing live via the online tracker, and then see the video in short and long form the following day, when it is published. We have all the links on the bottom of the JJ Giltinan stories in this edition of Sail-World.com's newsletter.

We have some more America's Cup news in this edition - could manage two America's Cup-free newsletters in a row. There are two galleries of images from Emirates Team NZ, including one sequence, as best we can get the shots in order, of a rough ride downwind in a good breeze. There's plenty of spray flying and one can only imagine how it looked on the water.

We also take a look at the AC72 foiling with some close up images, for the technically inclined.

In a video clip, Ray Davies and Dean Barker explain how the reduction in sailing crew numbers has been worked into the AC72 routines, and there are a couple of one-man bands running around the back-end of the boat - where previously two or three people would have covered off the required roles.

From San Francisco, there is a new video from Artemis Racing, taken on board, and with comments from Paul Cayard and Iain Percy. While a lot has been said about Artemis racing's inability to foil, some of the video does show the leeward hull lifting - but not completely clear.

Perhaps the most interesting video is a piece of Am-Cam footage taken of Oracle Team USA, sailing on San Francisco Bay, which shows the AC72 lifting onto her foils with difficulty - quite different from the from the impressive foiling performance in the video distributed earlier by the team.

We don't know the dates of either, or too much else - so drawing conclusions is not a safe process, but nevertheless the contrast is interesting.

Only a couple of hundred metres from the AC72 hangar in downtown Auckland, we step back into another age as one of the oldest yachts in New Zealand, Waitangi, was hauled on Monday, prior to a refit supported by The Lion Foundation.

We have a gallery of images of her being hauled, showing the classic Logan lines. There's some images from down below, too. We hope to able to follow her restoration in Sail-World.com

Good sailing!

Richard Gladwell
NZ Editor

sailworldnzl@gmail.com

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