SailJuice Blog

Maybe it was too much to expect. Maybe it was a symbol of the last two-and-a-half years of stop-start frustration that has marked the 33rd America’s Cup.

No racing.

Not even a sniff of it. After the whoop-whoop send-off for the two protagonists this morning, the building excitement seeped away as Day One of the 33rd America’s Cup turned to a damp squib. Alinghi 5 did their best to demonstrate the potential for racing, hoisting their sails and driving the boat as hard as possible in whatever gusts came their way, the Swiss catamaran generating 15 knots’ boat speed and raising a hull in just 5 knots’ breeze. BMW Oracle weren’t playing that game, preferring to bob around and wait for the wind to settle, which it never did.

“I heard it was 20 degrees and 14 knots’ breeze in RAK today,” was the dry comment from Alinghi’s engineering guru Dirk Kramers standing in the spitting rain of Valencia. The sodden spectators and photographers who shivered their way back from the 54-mile round trip to the start line were probably also wishing that Alinghi had got their way and that we were all sunning ourselves in Ras Al-Khaimah.

BMW Oracle’s meteorologist Chris Bedford summed up the weather: “We had a southerly breeze well offshore that was occasionally filtering into the start area. But closer to shore we had a westerly breeze for most of the afternoon. At times it was showing up to 14 knots at the top mark. So there was pressure trying to make it onto the course, but because of these two winds converging, we never had enough breeze over a 20-mile leg to get going… I think the Race Committee did a good job today.”

Now with the strict Deed of Gift rules to be abided by, we can’t look at a race until Wednesday, when the weather prognosis is not much better. Still, if you remember back to the Louis Vuitton Cup in 2007 it was nine days before the first race got away. So we might just have to learn to be patient a while longer.