He just meant that the cats in the Little America's Cup are faster than the monohulls in the "big" America's Cup.

As far as which is faster, an F-18HT or a C-Class, two people now have told me that they think the HT would beat a C-Class on a buoy course because the HT's downwind advantage with spinnaker would outweigh the C-Class' advantage upwind with wing mast.

The problem in such a match would be agreeing upon the course to be used. All those years when the C-Class cats were doing the race, they used a triangle course that heavily rewarded upwind performance -- about 43 percent of the time upwind compared to 17 percent downwind and the rest in beam and broad reaching.

The new format for the 18HT's will use a windward-leeward format, but even that can be manipulated to favor upwind or downwind performance, depending upon how many windward legs and leeward legs.

So the real problem would be agreeing upon a course that would be equally fair to both boats.

From reports on forums at this site, it sounds like the Australians who tried to submit a challenge have a C-Class almost ready to go, and Cogito owner Steve Clark has already gone on record as saying that he thinks the Australian challenge is viable and that an event between the U.S. and Australia can be done in 2004.

The question is, will it be done for the International Catamaran Challenge Trophy? I presume that will be up to the trustees of the Deed of Gift.

But this year and this new format are what everybody should be concentrating on at this point. Let's see how it works out. It is just great that the trustees have taken some affirmative action to get the show back on the road after this long hiatus.