Building time at the AC

by Sylvain Barielle, UK-Halsey Sailmakers on 15 Aug 2006 Action in the America’s Cup is all behind the scenes for now. There is no official racing scheduled until next year, but that doesn’t mean the syndicates are not busy. Now’s the time for testing, building and modifying boats, and a little bit of rest (not much!).

When racing starts again in April of 2007, all the teams will have a new Version 5 boats and I suspect things are going to get even closer. The China Team is in the process of building their new boat in China; we will have only one boat this time around.

Work at UK-Halsey Sailmakers is moving along on for the third generation of sails; after two years we are now finally starting to work on the very small details, which is a lot of fun. When we started the program at UK-Halsey San Francisco we here expecting some surprises. We had the knowledge of these type of programs, but getting a new America’s Cup sailmaking team together is always a challenge. I guess we made the right choices because so far and we had very few problems. Besides problems with shipping the sails, we’ve hit all our targets. So I guess life could have been worst.

Special thanks to a few of our guys at UK-Halsey who stepped up to the plate:
John Fries our lead designer, Andy Longarella in Spain who always gives us last minute finishing and modifications. The work done on his floor was key for testing a new sail plan geometry. I would also like to thank Brad Stephens and John Gluek at Dimension/Polyant for working with crazy people like me and the team at UK-Halsey Hong Kong.

There is a lot of work to be done yet. Expect a beautiful and amazing new boat for the Chinese team. I will keep you updated, but I will have to keep the juicy and technical stuff quiet until the Cup is over. To follow the efforts of the China Team, go to the website: www.china-team.org