USA and the Wing

[Frank Hagan]

The America's Cup is on right now, and the BMW-Oracle USA Team is flying over the water.

We're told that a sail on a sailboat acts like a wing.  Air moving over one surface creates higher pressure on that side and lower pressure on the other side.  That makes the boat try to move in the direction of the higher pressure, just as an airplane lifts off the ground.  But a triangular sail is a big flappy piece of cloth that you can make stiff only by applying tension at the top, the bottom, and one end of the sail (along the top and bottom of the mast and at the end of the boom).  

Well, that isn't always true.  The USA team's boat, USA, has a wing.  With flaps.  And what a wing it is!  It is 80% larger than a wing from a 747.  Its 223 feet tall (a 747 wing placed on end is only 147 feet tall).  Its only 2 - 6' wide, and being already stiff along its height, it doesn't need as much in the way of "trimming" (increasing the tension along the mast or boom).  

The captain is funny about that trimaran, because he only lets one hull actually touch the water on the course.

I think that horizontal wing the skipper is standing in is just to keep the boat on planet earth; the real wing I'm taking about towers above him, as shown in the first video.

[PAR]

Racing completed a few days ago, with the American "challenger" proving they had the better engineers. These boats traveled at double and triple the wind speed going up wind, then even faster going down wind. The first race was conducted in fairly light wind, averaging around 5 and 6 knots, but the average speed was 15 - 16 knots over the 40 mile course (they probably sailed more like 50 miles). The cat never really had a chance and was overhauled right from the beginning.

The cup is back in US waters where it belongs. Way to go BMW-Oracle.

[Hirilonde]

Hmmm, a team with a primary sponsor being a German automobile manufacturer and a crew with just  2 out of the 25 being Americans won the cup for the USA?  Money has always been the primary ingredient for winning, but now it seems to be the only one.  They didn't even list the team of lawyers, and they were the ones who really won.  The America's Cup has become a farce in my opinion.  There are so many races much more fun to follow these days.

I'm sorry if I seem so negative, but I see nothing to be proud of.

[Frank Hagan]

Oh, I don't know, last time I checked Oracle was a US company, and Larry Ellison was an American.  The Golden Gate Yacht Club is an American yacht club.  The other yacht clubs supported them in the legal challenge.

The Cup is controversial this year because of the phony Spanish yacht club who challenged the Swiss, and the quick acceptance by the Swiss, that the courts then invalidated.  You can't gin up a phony yacht club, without a marina, without any sailors, that has never held a race or even participated in one simply to keep the cup in your waters.  That was a farce.

Next year it should be back to an open race, with challengers from many countries.  And just like Spain, who hired an Italian captain to search for a new route to the West Indies some 400 years ago, I'm sure there will be international crews on all the boats.  We used sailors from NZ, Italy, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Holland, Antigua and the US.  Looked a lot like our population here if you add in a few more countries.