Through to the semi-finals
A fight to the finish in the third fleet race of Day 1 of the San Diego ACWS regatta gave Emirates Team New Zealand a second overall on points and, with it, a ticket straight through to the match racing semi-finals.
After being crowded out in the pre-start by Oracle 4 – for which the Americans were penalised for failing to keep clear – Dean Barker and crew fought back from last place to finish fifth.
The Americans, although penalised for the pre-start, finished the race second. Emirates Team New Zealand collected 23 points for the three races, one point behind the French Energy Team. Oracle 4 finished the day third with 22 points.
The top three finishers today take a day off tomorrow as the other six competitors race in the preliminary rounds of the San Diego Match Racing Championships.
The team’s mantra for today’s fleet racing which determined seedings for the match racing to come was “consistency” and they got that in the first two races with a second and a third placing.
The aim for the day was to finish in the top three and the fight back from last to fifth in the third race was enough to achieve that.
Emirates Team New Zealand does not race tomorrow.
Barker - with Glenn Ashby, Winston Macfarlane, James Dagg and Ray Davies – also got the fastest speed of 21.22 knots in the speed trial that followed.
A feature of today’s racing was the performance of some of the “smaller” teams which showed once again that every team is capable of winning a race.
Points after three fleet races:
1 Energy Team, 24 points
2 Emirates Team New Zealand, 23 points
3 Oracle Racing 4, 22 points
4 Artemis Racing, 21 points
5 Team Korea, 19 points
6 Oracle Racing 5, 18 points
7 Green Comm Racing, 14 points
8 Aleph, 12 points
9 China Team, 12 points 9
Speed trial results
Emirates Team New Zealand 21.22 knots
Oracle Racing 4 21.1 knots
Oracle Racing 5 19.86 knots
Artemis Racing 19.65 knots
Energy Team 19.36 knots
Team Korea 19.18 knots
China Team 18.54 knots
Aleph 18.33 knots
Green Comm Racing 17.91 knots
Emirates Team New Zealand tactician Ray Davies blogs on Day 1 of the America’s Cup World Series at San Diego.
Today’s plan was simple enough. Be consistent and make sure we were in the top three at the end of today’s fleet racing to ensure we went straight through to the match racing semi-finals.
We succeeded as it turned out, but not without some unplanned difficulty brought about by the failure of the gennaker halyard locking system.
It happened in the first race. And with the speed they turn these races around there was no time to fix it between races.
Consequently we had the halyard on a winch for the entire day. That sounds simple enough but it meant I had my head down trying to get tension on the halyard and not keeping an eye on lay lines and helping out with tactics.
Hoists and dropping the zero were really interesting.... but we battled through and finishing one point off the lead overall was a good result.
Today we had three fleet races, scoring a second and a third in the first and second races and a come-from-behind fifth in the third. We had a really bad start in race 3, when Oracle 4 failed to keep clear.
Oracle 4 copped a penalty but we were last off the line and had to fight all the way for a respectable result.
So no racing for us tomorrow. We’ll be out on the water as usual. There’s still A lot of racing in this regatta.
Pictures: Day 1 of the third America's Cup World Series event in San Diego.