How the Kiwis foiled Team USA, Santander and VOR 14-15

by Rob Kothe and the Sail-World team on 24 Sep 2014 Richard Gladwell's son Ben writes about the foiling Stratis 33 that gave the Kiwis the jump on the field in AC34.

Born from one of the best design labs ever assembled - in-house at Emirates Team New Zealand - the SL-33s were the prototype boats in the build-up to America's Cup 34 and are responsible for the team leading the charge in full foiling.

All the America's Cup syndicates were allowed to build two, 33-foot catamarans to test their design ideas; the boat developed by ETNZ would change the face of the Cup.

ETNZ needed to test its SL-33 concept and couldn't risk being observed by Oracle's spies. Rod Davis, ETNZ coach, devised a plan.

'We definitely did not want them to know that we had figured out how to fly at that point, but we needed to test, so we had to sail,' Davis explained.

And it was … read all about it below.

At the ISAF Sailing World Championships Santander 2014 - Australia won two bronze medals on the final day of the Santander 2014 ISAF Sailing World Championships in Santander as racing wrapped up in the Spanish City bringing the overall Australian medal tally to four – including one gold (470M), one silver (Laser) and two bronze (49er, Nacra 17).

On the final day Olympic 49er gold medallists Nathan Outteridge and Iain Jensen were reamed on the final run, they missed silver by two metres.

A pleasant surprise though when Jason Waterhouse and Lisa Darmanin won bronze in the Nacra 17, class, Nina Curtis (NSW) and Darren Bundock finished ninth.

Sail-World will have more from Santander over the coming weeks, we have literally thousands of images to sift through and some nice interview pieces yet to run.

Tomorrow we will be in Alicante, we will be interviewing the seven teams in the 2014-2015 Volvo Ocean Race over the next few weeks, then soon after we are off to the ISAF Annual Conference in Mallorca where on November 4th the ISAF World Sailor of the year will be announced.

But back to right now, lots of interesting news from Australia and the international scene.