SailJuice Blog

The Southern Cross Constructions crew of Euan Mc Nicol, Aaron Links and Trent Barnabas became the 2009 Giltinan 18ft Skiff champions today after one of the “craziest” races seen on Sydney Harbour.

Although the talented trio could do no better than fourth placing today, their overall point score of 18 points was just enough to defeat Active Air-2UE (Matthew Searle, Dan Wilsdon, Archie Massey) by one point, with Gotta Love It 7 (Seve Jarvin, Sam Newton, Tom Clout) three more points back in third place.

The final outcome was almost unbelievable as Southern Cross Constructions looked to have absolutely no hope for more than three-quarters of today’s race. Trailing the leader by four minutes and ten seconds at the first windward mark (and almost totally at the back of the fleet) Southern Cross’ crew could only watch as most of… Read the rest

Ben Ainslie and Iain Percy may not have won the Louis Vuitton Pacific Cup, in fact they didn’t even come close. But they and the rest of Team Origin acquitted themselves pretty well all the same. There’s no doubt the top teams will be taking them seriously.

Ben and Percy have shown an incredible talent for picking up new skills quickly, something they both did in 2002 when respectively they won the Finn and Star Worlds at their first attempt.

Percy’s advice for getting to grips with a new class is this:

• “The first stage is to learn the basic boat handling – get used to tacking consistently, gybing well, and make sure you can sail the boat without capsizing.
• “The second stage is to get out on the circuit and start learning from others – do a

… Read the rest

Glenn Ashby is a hard man to get hold of. I’ve been trying to track him down for an interview for a couple of weeks. It turns out Glenn is doing some coaching for the BMW Oracle guys in San Diego, who are working up the monster trimaran to faster and faster speeds while team skipper Russell Coutts and other members of the crew are out competing in Auckland at the Louis Vuitton Cup.

Anyway, I finally managed to track Glenn down last weekend, and wanted to ask him about A-Class Cat technology. Having bagged his silver medal at the Olympics last year, Glenn set about doing some sail development in late 2008 and did some preparation for the A-Class World Championships on Lake Macquarie north of Sydney. Glenn duly went on to dominate the event, making it his… Read the rest

Now this is a little off-topic, but I think you might be quite interested in watching this.

It’s not sailing in the strictest sense, but it is certainly wind-powered, and not a little bit terrifying too.

Thanks to Wetass for drawing my attention to this.

Enjoy – if that’s the right word for this…

I’ve just posted an audio MP3 interview with Terry Hutchinson on the secrets of his success in the Quantum TP52 campaign last year.

You can download the Terry Hutchinson interview from this link here:

http://www.sailjuice.com/articles/quantum-team

These are some of the things we cover in the interview:

Concept of Team

You need: work ethic, different personalities, and skill level – probably in that order of priority.

Everyone needs a solid work ethic, you need personalities that complement each other, and you need some Chiefs and some Indians, about a 30:70 ratio.

The Quantum afterguard

“When I look at the afterguard of our boat, you probably couldn’t find more diverse peronalities than me, Morgan Larson [tactician], Ian Moore [navigator] and Mark Mendelblatt [strategist]. I always feel we need a good balance of personalities, for when things aren’t going… Read the rest

I’ve just posted an interview with Jonathan McKee, who I knew from the days when he sailed past me on the 49er race course. After bagging his Olympic medals (a gold and a bronze), he’s been in the America’s Cup and most recently in the Volvo Ocean Race – but not since Cape Town! We ask Jonathan about that, and what he’s doing instead in the absence of Puma and the Volvo.

Click here for the interview (MP3 approx 10 minutes). You can download it to your PC or your MP3 player.

The SailJuice micro-universe has been a confusing place at times. Yes, we admit it! As we’ve experimented with different formats, blogging platforms and websites, SailJuice has taken various forms over the past three years, and held a few different addresses around the webosphere.

So we’ve tidied things up.

This – where you are now – is the new (old) home for SailJuice Blog. You might remember this is where we used to be – up until the beginning of the Olympic Games. We then moved to our ‘SquareSpace’ address for a few months, brought about mainly because of this Wordpress blog being blocked by the Great Firewall of China while we were reporting on the Olympic Regatta in Qingdao last summer.

We got a lot of nice feedback for our reports and interviews from Qingdao, and we’re proud of the… Read the rest

There has been a big shake-up, re-organisation and expansion of all things SailJuice.

We will no longer be updating this site on a regular basis, so please click on this link to find out what’s new in the SailJuice Micro-Universe…

CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT WHAT’S HAPPENED TO SAILJUICE…

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