Posts Tagged "America’s cup"

I was rooting for the Artemis team today! Not that I don’t like the Luna Rossa team, it was just that I really wanted the swedish team to win. I didn’t want the italian team to win with a clean sweep. I didn’t get my wish, Luna Rossa sailed a perfect race and they deserved to win, but Team Artemis made several mistakes including two unecessary out-of-bound penalties. It’s also sad for the Artemis team. A win today would have been so right. Congratulation to Luna Rossa for winning the semi-final. They will race against Team New Zealand next Saturday. Like Max Sirena said: “We hope that our design changes can make us more competitive than last time we meet Team New Zealand”. Let’s hope so, otherwise it will be again a...

The first race with two boats of the Louis Vuitton Cup happened Saturday in San Francisco. It was Emirates Team New Zealand vs. Luna Rossa. Team New Zealand was the favorite, but the question was how good are those kiwis? The answer is those kiwis are fast, really fast. In a 20 knots breeze (close to the race limit), they beat Luna Rossa by more than 5 minutes. Here is the difference right after the start, Team New Zealand is foiling at full speed, while Luna Rossa is barely foiling. Team New Zealand was looking really strong on each leg of the race. To illustrate the difference between the two teams compare the boats positions in the images pairs taken at the same spot. After the tack, Team New Zealand gets its boat regaigning speed a lot faster than Luna...

A quick postcard from San Francisco on this 4th of July. The America’s cup opening day was today. While the races only begin on sunday (with no real elimination until August 6th). It’s was really fun to see all the sailors and the Louis Vuitton’s cup (brand new cup) and the America’s cup up close. Let’s the race begin.

The second round of America’s cup World Series was held in San Francisco from October 2nd to October 7th 2012. This is not the official America’s cup (or even the Louis Vuitton’s cup) but a new way for sailors to get trained while they wait for their boats to be built. This was the round 2 of the series, with an impressive win in both categories (match racing and fleet racing) by Jimmy Spithill on Oracle Team USA Spithill. It’s true his crew trains all the time on the bay, but Ben Ainslie (on JP Morgan Team), who was new to the AC45, showed that it was possible to beat Oracle Team USA in San Francisco as his crew won one of the fleet races. I tried several locations to get shots of the races. On Tuesday, I was using a helicopter and...

This weekend was probably the busiest weekend in San Francisco in a very long time. At the same time, we had the America’s cup world serie, Fleet week, Castro Street, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Italian Heritage Parade in North Beach,  a playoff between the Giants and the Reds and a football game between the 49ers and the Buffalo. Generally, simply Fleet Week is crazy. This year it was overwhelming, and everyone was in San Francisco. I tried to escape the crowd somehow by getting on the water. The bay was really packed but still manageable. The good news is that the weather was very sunny and it has allowed me to take some new images of San Francisco that I was never able to get before. Sailing the bay is definitely something you should do if you...