From Team USA Blog:

Quote
After three years of training here in China we embraced the almost universal belief that this would be a light air venue. The big negative is that we simply made the wrong choice in choosing to race with our light-air Chupacabra gennaker, based on a weather forecast that never happened.

Today with a strong current running up the course, we had very quick upwind legs and long downwind legs. The wind out of the west was very shifty and puffy, blowing between eight and 15 knots. Conditions were difficult with lots of position flip-flops in the fleet. We sailed really, really well today, the best we have in this regatta, but our sail choice worked against us. We were always making gains on the short upwind legs and even sometimes on the long hauls downwind. But the fact was that the small spinnaker killed us downwind.

Today we learned over and over and over again, a lesson that we’ve already learned a million times - no two regattas are ever the same and it’s never like you think it’s going to be.



So, having a strong current shortened the time spent going to weather, increased it goign downhill...further minimizing the benefit on the CO.

Seems the winds were above what had been seen in the 3 year lead up. I'm not convinced the C0 is a failure based on this regatta.


Mike Dobbs
Tornado CAN 99 "Full Tilt"