Canada's Cup - Team RCYC & Team Macatawa

by Tory Crowder & David Matheson on 10 Oct 2007 The 2007 Team RCYC defender boat Honour will be skippered by Alek Krstajic, with a crew made up of an excellent combination of top young high performance Club sailors and world renowned professional sailors. Such high performance sailors will be shortly announced.

The professional sailors are the America’s Cup sailors - Gavin Brady (Team Oracle), Cameron Dunn (Team Mascalzone Capitalia), John Ziskind (Team Oracle) and John Cutler (Team Desafio Espanol) who will be involved but not racing. This year’s defence is founded on the great legacy of the Cup, the future for new high performance match racing sailors in our Club and an all out effort to win.

In making all this happen, Alek Krstajic views the most important factor to the success of the program is coming up with the right combination of sailors and support staff/volunteers. He has selected the professionals, not only for their impressive sailing resumes, but also for their commitment and dedication to the objectives of Team RCYC’s program.

They will be ambassadors for the cause and coaches, mentors and crew for Team RCYC, especially for the future advancement of our new high performance Club sailors who are very important for our Club’s longer term success in subsequent Canada’s Cup Championships. 'I believe it is crucial for the Club, as a leading yacht club, to continue our great Canada’s Cup traditions and to have our next generation in the forefront of the future Canada’s Cup history,' Alek remarked.

This year’s program is based on a three grand prix Farr 40 boat training plan. Paul Phelan’s two boats, Reliant and Defiant, complete this three-boat program. A single training day with the three boats involves 27 sailors, nine on each boat. Last summer Alek and Paul arranged for RCYC sailors, Chris Cook and Dave Jarvis, to organize match racing teams for Defiant and Reliant. They have been responsible for the training for 18 new high performance match racing sailors. They have been training in the Toronto habour and on the Lake. 'The harbor is the ideal place to work on changing gears. It is extremely shifty and it keeps you on your toes', Alex told us.

Macatawa's skipper, Bob Hughes, will be sailing with Mike Hill, John Trout, Bill Bennett, John Upton, Ellen Johnson, Mike Buckley, Wally Cross, Ted Etheridge, and Dave Dellenbaugh (1992 America’s Cup Champion) on the boat Heartbreaker. Team Heartbreaker has excellent straight line speed, a definite strength for him, and skills to hang-on in wind shadows for a very long time without losing too much distance. Team Macatawa is expected to come prepared with good boat speed and therefore starting is going to be extremely important to Team RCYC. 'We are focusing on this and other tactics throughout our preparation program', Alek assured us.

When Macatawa issued the call to challenge, Alek Krstajic was keen to defend the Cup for RCYC. He believes in building for the future of the Cup and knows that it takes a strong combined team and program at this time to make this happen. Will all of these efforts produce a winning combination in mid October? To find out and to catch all the excitement and action, come out on the water and keep posted on the Canada’s Cup reports on www.rcyc.ca.