A Big Week on the water... and on the land

by Rob Kothe and the Sail-World Team on 15 Dec 2012 As well as being a Big Week on the water, it was a giant travel week for the expanded Sail-World team hence the lack of newsletters and for that we apologise. But we are now back to normal service and will have our regular three newsletters a week from Monday.

Now to the onwater news..

In AC72-land Emirates Team New Zealand has officially 'clocked-out' of their 30 allotted 2012/2013 training days (the only team to do so by a wide margin) and are in the process of decommissioning their first-generation AC72. The next challenge for the team will be to finish fitting out their next-generation AC72, which they plan to launch in early February.

Sail-World’s Richard Gladwell has two must-see multi-media interviews, the first with ETNZ’s team boss Grant Dalton and the second with the team’s Technical Director, Nick Holroyd.

The inaugural Redbull Youth America's Cup, for 19-25 year olds, sailed on the AC45’s is set to take place in August/September 2013 in San Francisco, California, USA and Objective Australia has been announced as Australia’s team to compete in the Selection Series for the event.

Well known RPAYC sailor Tony Walls is the Team Principal and Sponsor. He said this week ‘Objective Australia will showcase the next generation of Australian sailing talent and is the first Australian team to compete for America’s Cup success in over a decade. We have the best youth sailors, including a number of World Champions and we are focused, organised and committed to doing our very best for Australia.'

The team will initially compete in the Selection Series in February 2013 sailing against other countries to earn the right to compete in the Red Bull Youth America’s Cup in September 2013.

Last weekend Garde (Brett Hobson and Brad Phillips) took out the NSW 12ft Skiff State championships on Sunday, winning race 5 and not needing to sail the final race in the series. We have lots of pix.

The serious toys came out to play in the Big Boat Challenge on Tuesday, with Bob Oatley’s two maxi’s, the 100-foot Wild Oats XI and the 66-foot Wild Oats X', taking home top honours. While the big boat faced little real competition, Wild Oats X had a serious tussle with her Reichel Pugh 66 sister ship, 'Black Jack'. We have lots of great pix.

Olympic classes are racing at the Grade 1 Sail Sydney 2012. After clean sweeping Sail Melbourne and two days of racing on Sydney Harbour the new Australian men’s 470 team of Mathew Belcher and Will Ryan have won seventeen out of the seventeen races they have competed in since pairing up. Supercoach Victor Kovalenko is looking as serious as ever, but there is a smile lurking.

One of the most closely watched classes at Sail Sydney is the 49er FX where the Kiwi’s Alex Maloney and Molly Meech (NZ), who were sailing the FX well before its Olympic 2016 selection, are continuing their blue streak. They won at Sail Melbourne and have won all six races so far in Sydney.

Behind them are a wall of Aussies, Ella Giudice and Caitlin Elks are second, Haylee Outteridge and Alison Dale are third. London Olympic Silver medallist Olivia Price and her crew Alanna Clancy are fourth.

Meanwhile at Hamilton Island a 42 boat fleet is racing in the 2012 UON SB20 World Championships
One of the SB20 young guns Ben Saxton (GBR) came out of the blocks early, while amongst the Australians the old master Glenn Bourke is sixth, with Ian Brown 12th, Nick Rogers 14th.

And on the Round the World solo scene, the Vendee Globe runaway leaders, Francois Gabart and Armel Le Cléac’h are south of Australia’s Cape Leeuwin.

And more nerd news from the land ... over the next few weeks we will be installing yet another two dual quad core servers at the server farm in Ultimo Sydney to try and keep ahead of the every growing Sail-World traffic and bandwidth demand.

We will have these operational ahead of the Sydney Hobart 2012 start. This will be a giant year for us, with a larger Sail-World team than ever before dedicated to bringing you the very best coverage.

The big traffic and bandwidth driver is mobile phones with video and images looking great, over half of our traffic these days comes from smart phones and tablets.

Have a great weekend and see you Monday.