Enjoy a Cup of Sailing

At the Pacific Strictly Sail Show, we were treated to a wonderful opportunity to see the America's Cup in person at Jack London Square in Oakland, CA as part of a superb presentation by the USA BMW Oracle racing team, winners of the 33rd America's Cup Regatta. I've seen the trophy once before, at Ft. Adams State Park in Newport RI during the UBS Cup Regatta between the Cup Defender Alinghi syndicate and BMW/Oracle. At both venues, the excitement I felt standing an arm's length away from the oldest trophy in sports spoke volumes of the importance of what the trophy means to Sailing as a sport and as a lifestyle.

During the century and a half that the America's Cup has been coveted by the richest and skilled yachtspeople in the world, few championships have been so enduring. The 33rd Challenge for the "Cup", saw a return to the "Deed of Gift" format of racing, allowing the yacht designers of the challenging and defending syndicates to ignore the "box rule" of the IACC class of yachts and build yachts that could measure 90'x90', essentially creating an Unlimited Open class of racer, with a budget to match. Despite the economic struggles of recent years, the current Cup winner pushed every technical envelope and spent huge sums on innovation just like the J-Boat class did during the Great Depression of the 1930's. How ironic.

But the net result was a return of the Cup to America's shores, this time in the hands of the Golden Gate Yacht Club of San Francisco. My hope is that there will be young sailors that will be able to share the excitement of the next Cup races as I did in my youth. With no internet or televised racing during the 1960's we relied on newspaper accounts of the races. I remember looking at pictures of Olin Stephen's Intrepid, the 1967 Cup Defender while sitting in class in middle school and thinking that one would never see a sailboat so innovative or radical in my lifetime. Now, USA, the trimaran raced by the BMW/Oracle syndicate creates such a huge leap in technology, we can only dream of what the Cup boats of 50 years hence will look like. Certainly function and form have come again to a crossroads and the final product may not appeal to everyone.

But hopefully, the designs of this decade's Cup competitors will light the fires of young sailors and aspiring naval architects, thus pushing the sport forward. The future of sailing and sailboat design can be significantly molded by the direction that the America's Cup Regatta will take and as a domestic industry, we would love to see a return to a Defender Series format that existed prior to the Cup races in Auckland. In doing so, there would be multiple US based syndicates vying for the rights to defend the Cup and in turn, multiple domestic boat builders would have the opportunity to build extremely high technology boats for that purpose. And the more builders that have the opportunity to build, the better the chances are that we'll see new innovations to gain that competitive edge.

The Edson Corporation would like to extend a hearty Congratulations to the BMW/Oracle team for their victory and hope they will consider a multiple defender series leading up to the next Cup defense. And a rousing thank you for making the Cup available and accessible to the boat show attendees. Let's just hope that the next Olin Stephens, Dave Pedrick, Britton Chance, or L. Francis Herreshoff were there to see it.