Sail On

The match races which will eventually determine the challenger for the 34th America's Cup sailing race (in 2013) are underway. The first round of the America's Cup World Series has taken place in Cascais, Portugal, and the teams are now preparing for the next round in Plymouth in the Southwest of England (beginning 9/10).

I wrote a bit about 18 months ago on the 33rd America's Cup challenge of 2010, which saw 150 years of sailing tradition turned on its ear with the shocking introduction of radically new and extremely advanced machinery to the world of international yacht racing. After the dust had settled, with BMW Oracle Racing's sweep of the series in the spectacular one-off USA 17, there was a sense that the series would return to more conventional machines, i.e. sloop-rigged monohulls. I felt a little twinge of disappointment.

(The 2010 champion USA-17, a 90' Tri-hull for BMW Oracle Racing.)

But there's no stopping the forward march of progress. Clearly, I was not the only one awed and thrilled by the technologies on display at the 33rd America's Cup, and the consignment of the multihulls to the scrapheap was premature. I think the speeds were just too addicting and the technology simply too mesmerizing to turn back.

(How to keep us down on the farm when we've seen this?)

And so race organizers have settled upon a 72 foot catamaran specification for the 34th America's Cup (slightly smaller and more tightly specified than the 90' multi-hull specification of the previous Cup). These boats do not yet exist except on paper. The America's Cup world Series match races currently underway are being run on scaled-down versions of the AC72, dubbed the AC45. These 45 foot carbon fiber wing sail catamarans are in themselves fabulous pieces of machinery. These early match races are used to winnow down the field and determine the final challenger, who will take on standing Cup holder BMW Oracle USA in 2013. It's in these final races we'll see the new AC72.



I love the concentration of so much human ingenuity on such a whimsical goal. Eight teams including the defender are involved in the challenge: BMW Oracle (USA--defender), Artemis Racing (Sweden), Emirates Team New Zealand (New Zealand), Aleph Equip de France (France), Energy Team (France), China Team (China), Team Korea (South Korea), and Green Comm (Spain). The design and manufacture of the yachts themselves is almost impossibly fascinating to me. All the design elements--hulls and sails and rigging and materials and tactics; everything is literally up-to-the-minute, and everyone is striving for the tiniest advantage, much like my beloved Formula One car racing. The crews of five or six guys per boat are jetting around the world, everyone approaching the business like a top-tier athletic endeavor. Watching everybody scurry around the boat as it rounds a mark, one understands the comparison. Imagine having this as your job! (Overheard in a bar: "Oh, I'm a grinder on an America's Cup yacht.")

(The high speeds also come with perils; the boats can be dangerous.)

There's something anachronistic about high-tech racing using only the power of the wind, but especially in these climate-conscious times that seems a boon (I'd love to see a similarly international effort given to electric car racing, and I think this is coming).



Racing organizers are also trying a new method of broadcasting things this year, putting everything on a really excellent website with hi-def videos on YouTube. I think this is beyond brilliant, and surely something that will become the norm for this type of activity. I can watch all the content on my schedule, plus lots of promotional material and in-depth features. I find myself sucked into these videos and hours pass.



If you have any interest in these things, take a quick look at the video channel. I defy you not to get sucked in! (But don't say I didn't warn you.)

OK, Devil's Supermarket

I guess I'm an old man waaaay behind the times.

Turns out there's another 16-year-old girl, an Australian this time, who is also vying for the title of youngest circumnavigator. Jessica Watson is most of the way done with her journey, and has a very similar website to Abby Sunderland's.

The video of her siting land around Cape Horn (her first land sighting in two months!) is amazing, and shows the dark desolation of the open ocean.

A Devil's Bargain

The last few days I've been following the adventure of Abby Sunderland, the 16-year-old girl from California who is attempting to break the record for the youngest person to sail single-handedly around the world. Her brother Zac briefly held the honor a year or so ago when he completed the task at age 17.

I find I'm quite conflicted about the whole endeavor. On the one hand, well, she's a 16-year-old girl. It's hard to keep one's head around all the ways this little stunt could go horribly wrong. I don't have a daughter, but the high-school-aged exchange students we've hosted (all fabulous kids) wouldn't have had the first clue about, say, putting a quart of oil in the car or how to change a tire. I've read several accounts of single-handing around the world--from Joshua Slocum to Francis Chichester and Edward Allcard and others--and this is a serious thing she's undertaken. It's hard for me to feel very sanguine about Abby's ability to meet all the unforseen challenges she will likely face here, both in terms of having the mechanical ingenuity to solve complicated problems or improvise her way around broken equipment (in very rough seas in the midst of stormy weather), and also in terms of her having the physical strength to manhandle a 40 foot boat when her automation fails, a boat the sails of which generate a huge amount of force. If everything goes well and everything works, I'm sure she'll be fine. But that seems unlikely with this kind of voyage, and then it all seems quite perilous.

With Abby's father being a sailor and her brother having accomplished the same solo circumnavigation (and I'd have felt the same trepidation with him) she certainly has people helping her who DO understand the challenges she's up against. But one wonders at the family when two kids undertake the same expensive, life-threatening challenge in back-to-back years. In interviews the father seems to me like a snake oil salesman, giving a slick little spiel and treating her, a young girl, like a force of nature. Some have gone so far as to call this child abuse on the parents' part, and it clearly plays at the boundary. Regardless, it's hard not to see this all as a calculated play for notoriety. This sensation is not helped by the father's statements that "We're born-again Christians, and we've prayed about this and this is god's will" (I'm paraphrasing). If he had contended that god wanted Abby to do this at age 14 he'd be locked up for trying. I've heard a couple quotes of him deflecting question about Abby's safety by saying "god is in control of EVERYTHING." What a rotten hill of bullshit on which to prop the life of your beautiful 16-year-old daughter. Either it's a ploy to pacify the stupid American public, or he actually believes it; either option seems contemptible. And let's face it, the only reason to undertake this at age 16 instead of a more sensible 21 is that THIS makes for a record and press coverage and whatever follows on from that. It's just very hard for me not to feel contempt at this. (Abby herself says "This is something I've dreamed of doing since I was 13." Honey, that's, like, yesterday. Clearly the planning for all this was begun when she was 14 or sooner.)

***BUT...***

On the other hand, I've dreamt of doing this very thing for years. I think single-handing a boat across oceans and into strange parts of the globe is an absolutely mesmerizing thing to do, and I'm very plainly jealous as hell of Abby. The risks involved, the reduction of one's day-to-day life to essential tasks (on many of which your very existence relies), the management of a complicated machine, the business of navigation and communication and reading the weather; all these things absolutely capture my imagination. Maybe a bit like warfare, I think this time for Abby will constitute a period where the trivial bullshit was swept from her life. This will likely be the most vital six month period in her life, at least until she moves onto another, further challenge.

So though I think the timing of this and the motivation of her family in not saying "Are you out of your frickin' mind?" is a bit suspect, I would love to trade places with her for this adventure. But if I were her dad, I'd encourage her and challenge her to finish high school and keep sailing and learning; and we'd start planning on her 18th birthday.

Of course I wish her the best and hope her adventure is a smashing success, not least because it will mean she has returned safely. I will follow this all with fingers crossed, and I'll dream of maybe plying some of the same waters someday in my comfy retirement.