America's Cup, tricky conditions in Barcelona for the AC75 boats

A rare offshore weather pattern on Saturday in Barcelona produced some of the trickiest conditions seen of the current testing period for Emirates Team New Zealand and Alinghi Red Bull Racing who both brought their AC75s out to maximise the October window.

The north westerly breeze filtering off the land and arriving on the America’s Cup racecourse via numerous downtown structures was throwing up some big shifts especially near to the beach as the boats beat up into La Barceloneta, but flat water gave the Flight Controllers and trim teams on both boats plenty of scope to run through modes and gear changes.

Docking-out and setting their M3 mainsail and J3 headsail, the Emirates Team New Zealand Chase Boat team towed ‘Te Rehutai’ out to the east to get well clear of the harbour before the sailors returned on a short beat and then bore away for a long downwind to take them offshore. In recent days, the development of the power delivery and sail control systems has been upgraded on the Kiwi boat and they’ve used their time in Barcelona to keep on pushing through the upgrades and modifications before they return for the New Zealand summer where their development work will continue on the team’s AC40s. Whilst today’s modifications were all hidden and internal, one thing we could see was their Lidar sail measuring and mapping camera being hung out on a pole on the port side. Previously these units have been mounted on the deck just behind the helms on both sides but the desire to try and get more accurate onboard data and a clearer view of what is happening on the double skins of the mainsail was clear.

Speaking afterwards Nathan Outteridge, helmsman onboard Te Rehutai gave a good analysis of the day saying: “We heard it's possible to get an offshore breeze and it's taken us almost four months to find one so yeah it was good to get out today and experience it and a bit of a leftover swell from the last couple of days and trying to work out what the racecourse would look like with this NW shifty offshore breeze. It was fun.”

Talking about the shifting breeze and how they sail the boat in those conditions, Nathan added: “You’ve just got to go through a lot more gear changes, down the bottom of the course that we had high teens often at the top of the course sometimes you had high teens, sometimes you had like 8 or 9 knots, so a lot of what we were trying I guess to work out today was just how quickly we can adjust the sail trim so that we can get through such a large range of conditions and it was shifting 45 degrees out there at times so you’re on like a glamour shift and you’re like ‘okay this is great’ and then you hit a boundary and you're sailing kind of back where you came from sometimes. So yeah it was it was definitely good for us to be able to do that and I think we've all done a lot of sailing in shifty venues and when you're in Barcelona for months on end and biggest shift you see is about 8 degrees it was nice to actually try and pick a couple today.”

Nathan also spoke about the modifications programme and confirmed that most of the changes are internal and unseen, however he did say: “It was pretty hard to validate how good the changes were given how unstable the wind was but you know we’ll have a look overnight and see how it goes and yeah a few more days ahead of us still with the big boat right now to push through some of those mods. We always planned to be here until the end of October so it's nice that we can keep developing right up until the end and yeah that was good.”

Alinghi Red Bull Racing were also out in their AC75 ‘BoatZero’ after a maintenance day on Friday and despite a few gremlins creeping onboard causing some stoppages, once they were sailing again, they looked very good with a slightly higher bow mode and more than capable of going through the required gear changes to keep flying. A highly productive four hours on the water, covering some 50 nautical miles kept the sailing clock ticking over and this hard-driving team are building in added confidence levels with every passing session.

Rodney Ardern, Recon Panel member and a vital link between the sailing team and the design office described the day saying: “The forecast was pretty accurate so we got pretty much what we expected but it was a little unfortunate we had a few little stoppages with a few little problems which we don't really know that complete story behind them but often they happen after a maintenance day and there's a little bit of fine-tuning to get the things running again.”

Rodney, a past America’s Cup winner and Round the World Race veteran summed up the mix of youth and experience in the team saying: “yeah well there definitely is plenty of people in the team with lots of experience but it's also trying to find a way to share that with the younger guys and try and inspire them to do their best and work hard all the way through.”

And talking about the value of sailing the AC75s in this October window, he added: “I think the AC75 in this period has being really good, I think Emirates Team New Zealand touched on it last week, having this size boat in these conditions, wave size, and everything is very critical even though everyone’s probably designed their boats already it's still just getting a good feel for what the conditions actually are in October and yeah I understand American Magic’s probably pulling theirs out next week or the week after so that’s good for them too.”

The Alinghi Red Bull Racing programme continues this week whilst for Emirates Team New Zealand they are planning a short tow-test session on Sunday. (Magnus Wheatley)