America's Cup: Kiwis back in action in Auckland

High summer in Auckland and Emirates Team New Zealand were back at it on one of their longest sessions to date in this training block after some ten days shoreside for what was suspected to be a major upgrade in componentry. However, coming back to the water today, very little from the outside to the naked eye looked to have changed with the team running the same asymmetric-foil (FW1207) on port and the FW402 wing on starboard.

Blair Tuke hinted at componentry upgrades, but today’s session looked more to be about data gathering and technique-honing with the new bolt-upright mode really ‘leaning’ in on the immersed foils as opposed to the windward heel mode adopted by so many other teams sailing the AC40 at the moment. Perhaps the mode change is a nod to the new AC75 that is less than two months’ away from launch now or it could be that the mode is designed to extract maximum baseline data from the foils – only the Emirates Team New Zealand design office and performance engineers could explain.

Searching for summer breeze initially, Peter Burling and Nathan Outteridge headed out to the beautiful Coromandel Peninsula and found better pressure into the early afternoon and completed a mammoth five-hour shake-down session with a big concentration on tacking – less so on downwind gybes – and a lot of ride height changes upwind especially.

A small stop to check the port foil – the one that has been of concern in recent sessions since launch was conducted with the Chase Boat alongside and a further stop was recorded by the recons with the sailors looking at the port foil and rig settings. Fine tuning seems to be the name of the game.

Speaking afterwards Blair Tuke, the stalwart Flight Controller and Trimmer, spoke to the recon team and summed up the day saying: “We couldn’t have wished for a better day than that, although the boat’s been off the water for a best part of a week now, we got a huge amount out of today probably one of our longest sessions I think ever, so big gains throughout, first of all just getting back into the swing of things and then really taking some good steps forward...we changed it up between straight-line upwinds and regular tacks as well.”

Asked about the take-aways from the day, Blair added: “Always fine tuning, been off the water for a week, couple of small modifications to a few components, checking how they went, been the same for last few weeks pretty critical time for us in design world, just evaluating how we are feeling on the water, especially on the foil front and how they’re feeling, plenty of data after a five hour session so we’ll go back and look at how those key things that we are looking at performed.”

Emirates Team New Zealand are scheduled to sail on Friday before a break for the weekend.