Oracle CEO and sailor Larry Ellison won the 33rd America’s Cup this weekend in Valencia, Spain in a race between his USA-17 and the Swiss defender Alinghi 5.
Brandon Bailey of the Silicon Valley Mercury News writes about the aggressive rule set that has allowed Ellison to excel both on and off the water: “Push the envelope on technology. Don’t be afraid to spend money. And make the competition personal.”
“‘He is perhaps the most aggressive CEO in the tech industry today,’ said Jon Fisher, a former Oracle vice president who now teaches business at the University of San Francisco. Fisher added that Oracle, a company that vies with such giants as Microsoft and IBM, is both highly competitive and ruthlessly ‘engineering-centric,’ even compared with other tech firms.”
Nathanael Herreshoff revolutionized American sailing boat design at the turn of the 20th century, “crafting innovative yachts that dominated the America’s Cup sailing competition for decades.”
Now a Rhode Island graphic designer and sailing captain, Will Sofrin, is using Massachusetts Institute of Technology records from two dozen of Herreshoff’s designs to help recreate original construction plans.
“Sofrin is deciphering tables of boat measurements left with a museum at MIT, which Herreshoff attended, and using the numbers to create mathematically accurate ink drawings, including of seven yachts designed specifically for the America’s Cup,” writes Eric Tucker of The Washington Post.
Herreshoff’s grandson, Halsey Herreshoff, is less than enthusiastic about the project:
“‘We don’t just hand [these designs] out to any old Tom, Dick and Harry,’ said Halsey Herreshoff, president of the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol, R.I. and America’s Cup Hall of Fame. ‘There was never any intention that these would be just spread around the way this guy is doing.’”
This week the 33rd America’s Cup kicks off in Valencia, Spain on the Mediterranean coast in a best-of-three format between USA-17 (owned by Larry Ellison of BMW Oracle Racing) and the Swiss defender Alinghi 5 (owned by by Ernesto Bertarelli).
The race will feature two giant multihulls, and record-breaking speeds are expected to dynamically change the “boat-against-boat” racing tactics often associated with the Cup.
Henry Fountain of The New York Times writes about the highly charged atmosphere–legal wrangling, media positioning, and personal jabs–surrounding the much anticipated event:
“The boats will head to the starting line Monday because 10 days ago, a judge in New York effectively told them to, refusing to expedite a hearing on whether Alinghi’s sails violated the race terms, as BMW Oracle claimed. That ended the court battles, at least temporarily, but did nothing to defrost the chill between Ellison and Bertarelli as the race drew near.”
Bay Area sailor and entrepreneur David de Rothschild has built a 60-foot catamaran largely from recycled plastic bottles. In March he plans to sail this environmentally friendly vessel (the Plastiki) across the Pacific to Australia.
“Behind the adventure is a dead serious message: de Rothschild wants to draw attention to a world of plastic waste. Only a fraction of the world’s plastic bottles are recycled, he says. The rest end up in landfills or out in the ocean. He figures the way to get the recycling message across is a plastic sailing adventure – a message in a bottle,” writes Carl Nolte of the San Francisco Chronicle.
“There is still a lot of fitting out to do, and several more shakedown cruises. If all goes well, the Plastiki – named for Thor Heyerdahl’s famous Kon-Tiki raft – will sail out the Golden Gate in about a month.”
Abby Sunderland, a 16-year-old from Thousand Oaks, California, has decided to sail her 40 foot boat, Wild Eyes, around the world to best the record of her older brother Zac, who completed his own 13-month solo-circumnavigation last summer at the age of 17.
If successful, Abby will be the youngest person in history to sail around the world nonstop and unassisted. It is believed she’ll be on the water battling circumstance, loneliness, and the elements for at least five to six months.
“‘Every little kid wants to be a doctor or a princess or a firefighter,’ Sunderland said during a pre-launch news conference, while trying to explain the motivation behind her controversial excursion. ‘But watching my own brother go out and actually do it; it really made me realize that you can do things like this,’” reports Pete Thomas of the Los Angeles Times.
