December 9, 2020
My friend Tom emailed me this…
Hi Rich, have you seen any of the AC boats sailing around? They look pretty impressive.
Here’s my response…
No, there aren’t really many AC boats here. Most are 12 volts DC, the same as in the US. The few AC boats here are 240 volts, 50 Hz.
Oh, wait?
Did you mean America’s Cup? Well, then yea, we see them. The AC bases are about a 5 minute walk from us. We see them launching regularly. We don’t really see them sailing though. They tow them out to the Hauraki Gulf for practice. When they tow them, they foil at about 25 knots towed behind RIBs with three or four giant outboard engines. We saw them out sailing in the distance when we went out to the Gulf but not close enough to be exciting.
In fact, I’m having a hard time getting excited at all about the cup. These are no longer boats but rather very low flying airplanes. The teams, especially the American team, aren’t very friendly. They frequent our coffee stand so we see them all the time, but they have this mistaken notion that they are the sailing elite. Being sailing elite ourselves, we find this hysterical. 😉
We saw both American Magic’s boat and the British boat going in the water today while we had lunch. The only other challenger here are the Italians (Prada). And of course, there’s Team New Zealand. You can tell them by the big United Arab Emirates signs everywhere. You can tell the American boat by the great big sign for a French aircraft manufacturer (Airbus). The British team is Ineos or something like that. I have no idea what that is.
Also, there are very few people with American accents on the American team. Most seem to be Australian or Kiwi.
So in summary, the not-really sailboats are operated by multinational advertising conglomerates, staffed by crew from around the world, as long as they can be snooty, work for less than minimum wage and still manage to act like they’re better than everyone else.
Note: I looked up Ineos while posting this. They are apparently a chemical company. I found the following statement on their website very funny…
Most of our employees have spent all their working lives in the chemical or oil industry. We continue unashamedly to extract best practices from this very impressive group of people in all spheres of activity.
Also, I guess I want to apologize for characterizing the racers as being snooty. Maybe they just don’t like me? That would be a sign of good judgement!
Here’s a post we did earlier with American Magic hanging from a crane.
– Rich
Update: Forget everything I said above. I just found out that you can now get a limited edition Prada bus pass. Wow, this race is getting really exciting!
