© Sander van der Borch/Artemis Racing
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Nonstop
EMERGENCY

That’s the prospect for Louis Vuitton Cup racing and then the America’s Cup, as the competitors imagine it, and that would include Artemis Racing skipper Terry Hutchinson. If I could summarize what the man had to say, on the phone from the Artemis base in Valencia, it would go:

It’s not what you got, it’s what you can use.

Terry posed the question, “How do we maximize the talents of Juan K and the rest of the design team but keep things reasonable when you’re going to be running into a boundary every 90 seconds?”

You know how, sometimes, you’d rather be wrong?

I seem to remember writing, “If” lead negotiator Stephen Barclay and his America’s Cup cohorts were a trifle naïve regarding San Francisco politics when they first blew into town, trumpeting the splendors to come, an 11th hour lawsuit filed last week by former President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and still-local chairman of the Democratic Party Aaron Peskin should complete their education. This is a blood sport, and you don’t have to be certifiably sane to play.

I remain on-message. The America’s Cup is going to be fine.

Unfortunately, if you also care about the San Francisco waterfront, then the news is less so good.

“If” lead negotiator Stephen Barclay and his America’s Cup cohorts were a trifle naïve regarding San Francisco politics when they first blew into town, trumpeting the splendors to come, an 11th hour lawsuit filed last week by former President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and still-local chairman of the Democratic Party Aaron Peskin should complete their education. This is a blood sport, and you don’t have to be certifiably sane to play.

I remain on-message, however. Relax. The America’s Cup is going to be fine.
Unless it’s the San Francisco waterfront you care about. Then you might worry. There’s still no Plan B.

A San Francisco treat since 2004, the Ocean Film Festival is growing in new directions, and you should know.

Will it go international come 2013? Don’t bet against it, and meanwhile there is a pre-event on Friday, February 24 at the Aquarium of the Bay to launch their first Evening of Sailing with three shorts and two, um, mediums.

Okay, we hope it’s not quite that . . .

Even as negotiations continued between the city fathers of San Francisco and the America’s Cup Event Authority, with Stephen Barclay as the lead, Oracle Racing held a media day on Tuesday—I suspect the sailing team would rather have had the time for other business—and my takeaway was a comment from Russell Coutts that he knows of a fourth challenger who has begun work on an AC72 catamaran for the 2013 America’s Cup match.

Good.

Très impressionnant!

It’s such a common phrase, such a common feeling, that we take it for granted. The romance of the sea. Even those who dwell far from the sea are not immune to it. Red sails in the sunset. The very notion of sailing away to paradise. Those who heed the call, those who love the sea and sailing, will not find it strange that a sailor would choose Valentine’s Day to write a love letter to the sport.

Once upon a time there lived a young man so enamored of sailboat racing that he couldn’t look out from the deck of one raceboat to another race going on over yonder without wishing he could be part of that race, too.

Absurd? Whoever said that Rational was a component of Passionate?

I’m not old enough to write a whole column about my digestion, but I will confess that I read the San Francisco budget analyst’s report/recommendations to the Board of Supervisors, parsing the latest business negotiations between the Port, the Office of the Mayor and the America’s Cup Event Authority, without fully digesting it.

That is, there wasn’t any sentence or paragraph that I didn’t understand, but—

Everybody please relax. The America’s Cup is going to be fine.

Through the lens of Gilles Martin-Raget

The recent spate of negative headlines from Auckland to San Francisco will someday make comic collectibles. I seem to recall, not so many years ago, a great handwringing around the building of a ballpark that was sure to drag the City of San Francisco straight to gridlock-perdition . . .

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday night voted 10-0 to reject two appeals against the America’s Cup Environmental Impact Review.

Though not until the AC Event Authority agree do re-site its JumboTron from a barge anchored in Aquatic Park – where swim clubs argued it would stir up toxic silt – to a spot on land instead.

The vote does not preclude civil action, but I note that certain parties to the appeal, such as the Sierra Club, are on record as wanting the America’s Cup to be sailed on San Francisco Bay. Things need to get moving and keep moving.