America’s Cup

Somewhere out there, America’s Cup 2013 is being won right now. During the recess before AC45 World Series racing resumes in April in Naples, Italy, design and engineering teams are racing to complete the first generation of AC72 catamarans eligible to race in America’s Cup 34.

In one of the more brilliant moves in modern sailing, the America’s Cup has opted to make live-streaming coverage of AC45 World Series events free and available to anyone with a computer. Broadcasting straight from Plymouth, England, World Series coverage began on Monday, September 12, featuring fleet racing in both 40 and 18-minute races. GPS trackers onboard the boats tracked everything

This story was originally published in the July 1995 issue of

The opening two days of the first-ever World Series racing in the 34th America’s Cup gave spectators in Cascais, Portugal, plenty of brilliant views of the lightning-quick AC45s. Here, SAIL brings the racing (and some of the shots) to you. The weekend offered racing at both ends of the spectrum: Saturday dawned grim and cloudy, with conditions that normally would

Beyond aerodynamic efficiency, wings bring one special, not so obvious quality to multihull sailing — flotation. The forward element and each of three flaps in the aft element on an AC 45 are airtight and buoyant. As long as the wing stays in place, the boat will not turn turtle.I’m figuring the rest of America’s Cup 34 floats, too, but that’s not for lack of doomsayers on the

The joke was on me. I dosed myself with ibuprofen both the night before and the morning of, but my ride on AC45 #4 was the smoothest fast sail I have ever had. Upwind at 16 knots, downwind at 29—downwind meaning that we would arrive downwind of our starting point, but because the apparent wind was so far forward, I couldn’t exactly feel the breeze on the back of my neckIn

The 34th America’s Cup teams appeared together for the first time in San Francisco this week during a press conference to announce the line-up of competitors. Already down from the 15 teams that filed to compete by the April 1 deadline, eight arrived in the 2013 host city, with a ninth to be announced in Europe next week.New to the America’s Cup is the Republic of Korea, and

I have to tell it to you backwards. It looked like this . . .But it went like this . . . 5) I’m hanging onto a strap on AC45 #4, the Oracle Racing cat skippered by Jimmy (“Everyone’s wearing helmets for a reason”) Spithill, and we’re making tracks toward a destination on San Francisco Bay that will soon be downwind

Winds in the mid-20s and a small craft advisory didn’t stop Jimmy Spithill and Russell Coutts from heading out to test sail their AC45s in San Francisco Bay on Monday, June 13th. Owned by Oracle Racing, both boats were preparing to head to Cascals, Portugal later this summer for the America’s Cup World Series. But in a dramatic explosion of wind, wave, and carbon fiber, Coutts’ buried