5th July, 2011 Team Gaebler Extreme Sailing News – Boston at its best!
The sail racing in Boston was perfect. The wind was light, but absolute fine
for racing. We had a great organization and thousands of sailing fans every
day at the promenade of the Fan Pier. It was real Extreme Sailing at its
best in Boston. The pictures are speaking for themselves.
But it was not the week of Team Extreme. Mostly everything went wrong for us
at the Series in Boston. We had massive problems to speed up with the spare
boat we got after the crash with Team Alinghi in Istanbul.
We were so happy to continue sailing in Boston with another boat and the
Team from OC helped us a lot to get us on the water. They send a boat
especially for us from the UK to Boston. But somehow we were not able to get
the boat running well. On top of this we made wrong tactics and bad moves on
the water. But this happens, if you need to change the boats.
We tried it all with different trimming of the boat. We tried to compensate
it with more extreme tactics. But we failed and we are very frustrated.
Sometimes this happens in sailing competition. Not always it’s going fast
forward. This time we sailed backwards.
We got a great US sailor on board with Robert Merricks, who won a silver
medal at Sydney Olympics in the 470 class. He performed very well as bowman
and gave us a great input to our team. We wish we were able to give him a
better result.
Yes we won one race and we had some more highlights. But overall we
performed not so well. We will analyze our mistakes and we hope to come back
with a new boat in Cowes (6-12. August) for the next Extreme Sailing Event.
Yours, Team Extreme
*Photo Gallery **http://www.extremesailingseries.com/gallery*
*Video Alert: Kiwis snatch Boston victory in final minutes of US debut*
Dean Barker’s Emirates Team New Zealand clinched victory at Act 4 of the
Extreme Sailing Series™ in an epic showdown as the circuit made a very
successful USA debut. As the country celebrated Independence Day, American
Terry Hutchinson on board Artemis Racing went in to the final race with an 8
point lead after heading the leaderboard for most of the past 5 days – but
lost in the final leg of the final race of the final day. An enthralled US
non-sailing public turned out in spades to watch up close what was probably
one of the biggest ever on-site American audiences for a sailing event,
estimated at 55,000 over the five days.
