Bermuda Race, Clipper, Cup - Sailing news from N. America and beyond

by David Schmidt, Sail-World USA Editor on 21 Jun 2016 If you’ve spent time around offshore racing, you’re familiar with the pre-race jitters that can be associated with unknown variables, with weather topping that particular chart. Such was the case with this year’s Newport Bermuda Race, as forecasters were predicting heavy weather, triggering 46 boats drop out prior to starting, and (at the time of this writing) forcing another seven boats to retire due to mechanical problems.

For the boats that did start, however, the wind delivered fast reaching conditions that saw Jim and Kristy Hinze Clark’s 100-foot Comanche take line honors while shaving almost five hours off the previous course record. Ken Read, Comanche’s all-star skipper, wasted no time in pointing to the most important variables that led to their success, including weather-forecasting and navigational contributions from Stan Honey, whom Read called the world’s best navigator upon reaching Bermuda.

Comanche’s elapsed time was a jaw-dropping 34 hours, 42 minutes and 53 seconds—not bad for a 635-nautical-mile passage!

Great stories are also emerging from elsewhere in the fleet, including that of High Noon, a youth team that was lent a Tripp 41 by owners Steve and Heidi Benjamin and is (at the time of this writing) a contender for the St. David’s Lighthouse trophy.

Get the full Newport to Bermuda report, inside this issue, and be sure to stay tuned to the website for more race-related coverage, as the news unfurls.

Also offshore-related, the Clipper Round The World Race fleet has now left the Big Apple and is sailing towards the Northern Ireland city of Derry-Londonderry, having started their final offshore leg of the 2015-2016 event this past Monday. Less than five nautical miles separated the tightly packed fleet at the time of this writing, making for a competitive dash across the Atlantic.

Sail-World was lucky enough to spend some time with the fleet in New York City, prior to their departure, so please stay tuned to the website for in-depth interviews with sailors, skippers, and sponsors, starting later this week.

Meanwhile, in America’s Cup news, word has broken that Emirates Team New Zealand (ETNZ) has launched a new custom-designed AC45S catamaran, and has also named ASB as an official team sponsor. ETNZ now joins ranks with Oracle Team USA, Artemis Racing, Team Softbank Japan, and Ben Ainslie Racing, all of whom have elected to build AC45S catamarans as training vessels for the AC50s that will be used to contest the 35th America’s Cup (June 2017).

“This is certainly the most complicated boat we have ever built,” said construction manager Sean Regan. “The amount of detail and systems that go into the construction of this boat is astonishing. This has been a huge effort by our guys in the shed to create such an amazing piece of machinery, and of course the designers who have been pushing the design throughout the construction process.”

While ETNZ’s new 45S is considerably smaller than the mighty AC72 that the team used to come within one race of winning the 34th America’s Cup in 2013, Grant Dalton, the team’s CEO, said that there is no comparison between the two boats. “This boat makes the AC72 from San Francisco look like a dinosaur,” said Dalton at a press conference.

It will certainly be interesting to see ETNZ’s progress with their new boat, and-more importantly-how the team stacks up against their Bermuda-based rivals come next June, when “AC35’s” starting guns begin to sound.

Fortunately for the Kiwi team, however, they will be transiting from Down Under to the “Onion Patch” via cargo ship and jetliners, so offshore weather reports are considerably less important to them than they were to Newport Bermuda Race sailors last Friday, hours before their start.

While this makes for an (relatively) easy passage for ETNZ, once on the island the sailors' real work begins. Not so for the hundreds of sailors who are racing to Bermuda this year, as their work is complete the second their dock lines are secured.

While I’m no meteorologist, it’s a safe assumption that the Bermuda fleet will experience some Dark and Stormy moments once they are safely ashore, sails flaked, passports stamped, and pre-race jitters usurped by the accomplishment of having completed one of the world’s greatest offshore events.

May the four winds blow you safely home,