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AS THE SKIRTS DROP, LAWYERS STOP THE SAILING
In a development that Michel Bonnefus called "devastating", the descendants of King James I of Aragon (1208-1276) have obtained a restraining order on America's Cup management and the city of Valencia, preventing any "commercial use of waters" claimed by the Montpellier family. That includes the entire sailing area for Act 13, the Louis Vuitton Cup, and the America's Cup.

"We've been quietly negotiating this for many months, even offering a significant 'incentive' payment to the family to quit their claim on the area but they've pushed this to the brink and have found a receptive ear with a local judge with monarchist leanings," said an attorney for the America' s Cup who insisted on anonymity.

The heart of the claim rests with the fact that in 1238 when James I conquered the city of Valencia, he did not annex it to the kingdom of Aragon or Catalunya, but made it into an autonomous kingdom within the group of States under his sceptre. That historical quirk has never been addressed by any subsequent court or national body. Thus the claim that the entire city of Valencia still falls under the ownership and rule of James' descendants apparently has enough validity to warrant this unprecedented action.

"Oh, this is a legal scholar's dream case" said Enrique Chata-Ortega, chancellor of Madrid's famed University Alfonso X El Sabio. "We have 800 years of history to sort through, this could take years to resolve. Ultimately I believe the family's claim will lose in court but that's little consolation now to the event organisers who are prohibited from launching."

A spokesman for the Montpellier family denied rumours that they pushed for an injunction after being denied a position as "17th man" aboard the Spanish syndicate Desafio Espanol: "We're Catalans, not Spaniards! If all we wanted was 17th man it would be with those cute Latin Rascals... Madame de Montpellier would love to be seated immediately behind Nacho and Flavio..."

Legal wranglings continue as the deadline approaches...

www.americascup.com

RORC RATING OFFICE RE-LOCATES
With E-Mail and internet communication now universal in the field of yacht rating, the RORC Rating Office has reviewed its operational practices and concluded that there is no longer any need to be located in expensive offices on the South Coast of England. The office will therefore be re-locating this weekend to Port Askaig on the Isle of Islay in the Inner Hebrides, Scotland.

Commenting, the mayor of Port Askaig said: "We are delighted to welcome this prestigious and important sporting centre of excellence to Port Askaig. We are very pleased to have been able to assist in this move by negotiating a rent free period for the offices resulting in considerable saving to yacht owners over the next few years. With all the wind we have up here, we have also invested in a wind turbine to provide the office with green power and even more money saving for owners."

Excellent co-operation from British Telecom has resulted in the Rating Office retaining all its current phone and FAX numbers. Mail should continue to be sent to the old address and will be forwarded by the Post Office. Owners will not therefore see any change.

Responding to criticism that this would make the Rating Office remote and inaccessible, a spokesman noted that Port Askaig was served by daily scheduled ferry services direct to West Loch Tarbert, convenient for the annual Scottish Series. It was also planned to install controllable webcams at major yachting centres directly linked to the new Rating Office. Owners would position their boats on a turntable adjacent to a webcam enabling Rating Office staff to see the boat from all angles.

A spokesman however said that the staff would welcome visitors to the luxurious new offices at Palofilor House, Paloneri Way, Port Askaig, Islay, IS1 APR.

CHUNDER CHOWDER
Ever wonder what Volvo Ocean Racing teams eat in the Southern Ocean? What they do with flying fish that land aboard (other than just toss them overboard)? Are there some of Neptune's Nigella's out there on the VOR 70s? Well now you can find out, with the publication of the new Volvo Ocean Race Cookbook. Pavement Pizza, Ballistic Breakfast, Acid Flavored Stew and more... and that's just from the Southern Ocean section.

Cutting edge cuisine...Raw fish with raw squid in a raw seaweed salad, as only the chefs from Cordon Blecch can prepare it. Freeze dried gouda gargle.. yum! An essential for any galley. See www.volvooceanrace.com

WHAT'S UNDER THE DOME?
While most attention has gone to the keels after this weekend's up-skirt ceremony, another controversy has simmered under the surface... and this one's straight out of science fiction. Knowledgable experts in the field (and there aren't many of them) have told Valencia Sailing that the oddly shaped dome on the back of Alinghi's new boat is not simply for communications. It's best described in layman's terms as emitting anti-gravity waves, which make the boat hundreds of pounds lighter.

"The technology on this goes back to secret US experiments in the Philadelphia Boat Yard in World War II... we found a way to eliminate the green fog that their magnetic field generators created, that would have been a rather difficult phenomena to explain in the America's Cup Village, even with the odd foodstuffs being prepared there by the Kiwis, I didn't know you could fry Marmite.. but I digress. We're not interested in teleportation as the Yanks were, but... if you're going to lift a ship and move it hundreds of miles, obviously if you turn down the roentgen krellnids a few millibits, you don't lift the ship but you do lighten it..." said a Swiss scientist who insisted on anonymity. "Bertarelli sold his company to fund this... these wave inducers make flux capacitors look cheap.. any idea how much Beryllium costs these days? All the money you can shake a stick at, plus the stick!"

Chief America's Cup measurer Ken McAlpine, when questioned as to whether ACM should re-weigh the boat with the dome "turned on" said "oh sure, I want to be crawling under the boat whilst something from Einstein's Grand Unified Theory nightmares hums merrily above me, threatening to rip the electrons from the atoms in my eyeballs. Sure. That sounds like a great way to spend an afternoon...."

Representatives from Alinghi were unavailable for comment at press time.

www.alinghi.com and www.valenciasailing.com

OOOPS... ISAF MISSES ITS CENTENARY BY TWO YEARS
While centenary celebrations and preparations continue, the ISAF offices have realised that they're two years late... that the 100th anniversary of the founding of the world governing body was actually in 2005, not 2007.

Documents recently re-examined from the founding of the International Yacht Racing Union, in preparation for display at the ISAF's current headquarters in Southampton, have shown a simple but glaring mistake... the year designation on the articles of organisation actually read 1905, not 1907.

"It's those bloody Frogs, again!" stated ISAF President Goran Petersson. "They put that silly little horizontal line across the middle of the digit seven... well, if you don't do a good neat job of that, it can make a seven look just like a five, and vice versa! All very confusing. What appears to be 1907 was actually 1905. If the French would stop wasting time and ink on useless flourishes in their digit calligraphy, we'd never have made this mistake. We were giving them the benefit of the doubt here, never a good idea when the French are involved. Why the proper British gentlemen who founded the International Yacht Racing Union chose Paris as their meeting venue is beyond me. Aside from the weather, food, women, wine, museums, cabarets and architecture, what has Paris got over London?"

Representatives of the FFV, incensed at Petersson's remarks, have reportely threatened to cancel all French ISAF Centenary events and to levy an "incoming Limey tax" on any British boat entering French waters this year. Arbitrators from the EU have been contacted in an effort to calm the waters.

HIGH SEAS WEATHER ROUTING... A RULES DILEMMA FOR THE FIGARO
Trouble is brewing in the Figaro Beneteau class ahead of this year's running of the famed La Solitaire Afflelou le Figaro singlehanded race. Class and race rules specifically prohibit any outside third party weather information to be sent to the sailors whilst racing in any of the four legs via radios, telephones or electronic communication devices of any kind. But what of information imparted via telepathy?

The psychic bond between identical twins has long been noted by scientists; the general consensus being that those abilities, if they exist at all, exist only in the very young and fade within a few years of birth. That consensus has just been shattered by a pair of Italian sailors, Pietro and Gianfranco Sibello.

The Sibellos are currently ranked second in the International 49er Class, and top contenders for the 2008 Olympics in that class. Pietro has decided this summer to extend his training programme to the Figaro, and has entered the grueling four-leg single-handed race. He'll have a distinct advantage over his rivals unless class or race officials expel him from the race: he and his brother communicate telepathically, and have proven the ability to pass complicated instructions, including weather conditions and predictions, to each other over virtually unlimited distances.

"It's more than just visual symbols.. I can hear Gianfranco talking to me from hundreds of miles away, as we demonstrated in tests conducted by the University of Turin. Hey, if he's going to stare at weather charts and grib files and then let me know where the wind is, and where I should go to find it, well... I find nothing in the Class or Regatta rules to prohibit that. We're not using radios or telephones. And who's going to prove it, eh?"

Regatta organisers seem intent on having National Authorities rule on this bizarre case. "We expel them for something not in the rules, or in the realm of science, and we open ourselves to untold legal action," said race director Jacques Caraes.

www.lasolitaire.com

TAKING THE TAMARACK HI TECH
It's been used for centuries, prized as a durable wood for boat building. The lower part of the trunks and large right angled roots that were naturally curved were in great demand. These curved pieces or "knees" were utilized for ribs and keels in dories and schooners. The Eastern Larch, otherwise known as the Tamarack, has now found a second life in boatbuilding as perhaps the ultimate construction material.

Scientists in Scotland's Royal College of Science and Technology have perfected a method of extracting very long filaments from the fibrous roots of the tree, said filaments have shown remarkable tensile strength when combined with a resin based on the tree's own sap and high pressure/high heat curing. "We're talking near carbon-fibre strength here, lads" said chief engineer Beaurigard 'Scruggs' McTavish. "As an advanced project, I had one of my engineering classes do a single mat layup to create bumpers on a half dozen fairground dodgems. I then provided them with a case of Talisker and said I'd give an honours grading to the student who most thoroughly wrecked said bumpers. A dozen wrecked students is all I got; the bumpers withstood all manner of impacts. This stuff is bloody bulletproof and weighs almost nothing."

Industry insiders noted the paucity of specifics in last Friday's announcement from PUMA about their new Volvo Ocean Race campaign; it's now reported that the lack of information on builder, designer and boat are because PUMA are in negotiations with the Royal College to obtain exclusive licensing of the process.

IRC'S EDIBLE BOAT LOOPHOLE
"We put it into the rule as a joke.. which has now backfired on us rather badly", says the RORC Rating Office supremo Mike Urwin. "For chissakes, who would honestly have thought anyone would build an edible boat."

But that is precisely what Dublin-based, American born naval architect Mark Mills has done in conjuction with famed British boat builder Green Marine.

Using the highly-fibrous seaweed extract Alginate, in combination with a secret bonding resin, Mills/Green have built a 46 footer that carries a TCC of 0.635. "Minutes per hour, mate, over the competition! MINUTES, NOT SECONDS!!" said Mills after obtaining the boat's intial rating from RORC's Lymington office. "Break off a chunk of the boat... boil it for 15 minutes or so, and you've got the equivalent of a bowl of steel cut oatmeal. A bit less tasty, but fully edible, and damned good for you too! And as an edible boat it picks up an IRC rating to kill for."

Mills has had huge success with his IRC designs, most recently and notably the DK 46, built in Malaysia. For this project however, he's kept construction in the UK, tapping Green Marine to do the work. "For years everyone's been confused about the word 'Green' in our name, assuming we were a bunch of granola crunching, tree hugging environmentalists up here making boats out of recycled newsprint, crushed beetle larva or some such rubbish. Um.. well.. I guess we are now... said a chagrined but smiling Bill Green. "I don't know whether Mills chose us a joke or out of genuine confusion over our work with exotic materials... but we're pretty proud of our work on this one!"

Urwin: "As IRC is a secret rule, someone had to let this slip, probably at a pub somewhere in Hamble, and Mark got wind of it. Now we're stuck for this season. Rest assured we'll write this out of the 2008 rule, but in the meantime, I'd recommend everyone just park their boats for the season, or at least any race where this beast shows up. It'll be like driving a Porsche in a Volkswagen race."

For more on Alginate:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/09/050928085118.htm

THE LAST WORD
April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four. -- Mark Twain

OC Events, www.ocevents.org , organisers of two major IMOCA 60 oceanic events, the new double-handed Barcelona World Race 2007, and the original solo transocean race, The Transat 2008 (ex-OSTAR) plus the Extreme 40 Sailing Series for The iShares Cup.

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