I didn't spell this out very well but when I mentioned earlier the lack of using multihull (or boats that sail strictly on apparent-wind - like the moth) familiar sailors, I was talking mostly about Oracle & Alinghi. I was also talking about AC33 - the point at which they switched to mulithulls and stuck with their traditional AC crowd. Certainly there has been some influx of skilled life-long apparent-wind sailors and yes, definitely, the more traditional sailors are capable of, and have, adapted. Most big name French sailors ARE multihull sailors so that makes sense that teams derived in France would turn to guys like Loick (my favorite!) and Cammas. Oracle did invoke Melvin & Morrelli to assist with the boat design in AC33 but let them go (or was it just Melvin?) shortly after they helped develop the rules for AC34. New Zealand wisely snatched up Pete Melvin shortly after that and he played a sizable role in their foiling development.

What we HAVE seen, though, in AC33, AC34 we saw some wrong application of monohull tactics in multihull sailing and we saw some multihull handling mistakes than many of us made when we first started sailing multihulls (but, notably, I don't recall seeing Groupama making any of these types of errors). We've still seen a little bit of this in AC35 but not nearly as much - they are mostly past the inexperience curve.

My point is, the main AC teams in AC33 and AC34 discounted multihull experience and stuck with their in-crowd. As far as the in-crowd, yes, DEFINTELY, they are stuck as the in-crowd. Ted Turner had to practically beat, scream, pay, and yell his way onto the helm of an AC campaign and if you judge one single fact alone, just look at the number of Australian and New Zealander sailors that make up practically every team. Yes, there is still a good bit of an in-crowd going on.


Jake Kohl