America's Cup - Emirates Team NZ flies into the New Year

by Hamish Hooper, ETNZ on 14 Jan 2016 Emirates Team New Zealand have been back out on the Waitemata harbour this week putting its first test boat through its paces after a short break over the summer holidays in typically perfect summertime sailing conditions in Auckland.

But not everyone has had the luxury of a lot of downtime over the break.

“We have had some guys working hard over the holidays continuing to develop the platform, from where is was prior to Christmas,” said skipper Glenn Ashby.

“And from the get go leaving the dock this week we could already tell there have been some great improvements.”

It has been an gratifying start to the year for the team, excited to be back after a refreshing break ready for what will be the most significant year of development in this America’s Cup cycle.

Although design and development has been going on within the walls of the design office for over 2 years now, putting those ideas and concepts to the test is the exciting part for not only the designers, but also the vital shore crew and obviously the sailors themselves.

“Already this week has been the most exciting and rewarding of this whole campaign for the team. We were ripping it up around the harbour putting some good time into our maneuvers and speed which was great fun on top of the usual systems testing and improvements,” said tactician Ray Davies.

“Obviously we still have an enormous amount of work to do this year, its daunting actually, but to be honest everyone here seems really fired up and eager to attack the mountain we have to climb to get to the level we need to be at to win this America’s Cup.” Explained Ashby

With the team testing program at home, as well as the five or six events on the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series among other sailing, 2016 is certainly going to pass by at high velocity for everyone at Emirates Team New Zealand.