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Brought to you by Yachtworld.com Europe and boats.com Europe, Scuttlebutt Europe is a digest of sailing news and opinions, regatta results, new boat and gear information and letters from sailors -- with a European emphasis. Contributions welcome, send to
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Alinghi Forfeits America's Cup
Bertarelli Buys Out Bernie Ecclestone
New York, NY, USA: Legal representatives for America's Cup defender Alinghi today announced that they will forfeit the America's Cup, throwing yet more turmoil into the 33rd and 34th America's Cup competitions. Just one day before the scheduled legal hearing about the date for the multihull match that was to have taken place between Alinghi and BMW Oracle Racing, Ernesto Bertarelli made the following statement at a hastily arranged press conference at FIA headquarters in Paris:
"It is now clear to me that the sailing world is not interested in change, in progress for the America's Cup. My vision has come at the wrong time... some may say too soon, perhaps it's too late to save the Cup from the shackles of history. What I wanted to do was to become the Bernie Ecclestone of sailing... to run the America's Cup and related events like the Formula 1 circuit. That no longer seems possible... so I've decided that instead of emulating Mr. Ecclestone, I'd buy him out. We have successfully concluded our negotiations and while I am saddened to be leaving the world of the America's Cup and sailing, I'm very excited to announce that I am the new Formula 1 Supremo!
"Giving Max Mosley the boot is one of my first tasks. Wait, perhaps I should rephrase that...
"And I have some exciting ideas for changing Formula 1. National teams with citizenship requirements would be a great start. And color schemes based on national flags. And I'll have to have a lot more control over television rights, photographers, journalists and sponsor logos. We're headed into a fantastic future."
A spokesman for BMW Oracle was nearly at a loss for words. "We don't know where to start... there is simply no precedent for a forfeiture. Nothing in the Deed of Gift gives any indication on who should now be the Defender or the Challenger of Record. What on earth are we supposed to tell Judge Cahn tomorrow? We'd be better off just flipping a coin..."
Former F1 World Champion Jackie Stewart said simply "You have got to be f'ing kidding me. Since when does building a business empire on selling a derivative of nuns' urine qualify this guy to run Formula 1 ?!?!?!?"
www.americascup.com
www.fia.com
Panic In Minden As Sail Membrane Gains Self Awareness
Photo at left: Psychologist reading David Hume's 'A Treatise of Human Nature' to 3N
Minden, Nevada, USA: A secret sail manufacturing process pioneered by North Sails at their Nevada desert facility is secret no longer as a team of U.S. government scientists from nearby Groom Lake has been flown in to contain what one sailmaker has described as "an apolcalyptic event". "We have been working on a new sailcloth that has a memory... literally. Using an amalgam of carbon fibre, microprocessor chips and certain organic materials, we hoped to create a neural net cloth. A sail that would learn from windspeed, direction and point of sail in order to store data and, in effect, trim itself and build a knowledge base."
Code named 3N (North Neural Net), the sail membrane was undergoing wind tunnel testing when programmers discovered that rather than sending data out, the sail was absorbing information from North's super computers... and from the internet.
"We noted megabytes, then gigabytes, and then terabytes of data flowing not FROM the sail membrane, but INTO the membrane. At some point on the evening of March 30th, the 3N sail gained self awareness and began communicating with us... simple one line command code, then questions, what appeared to be Zen koans ... and then a near constant stream of mathematical and chemical formulas, followed by what are, according to Dr. Stephen Hawking, the solutions to the questions of dark matter, gravity and the Unified Field Theory."
3N's IQ is now at least 300 and climbing. Terrified scientists disconnected the membrane and all North computers from the internet. Turning off the power to the facility had no effect (other than making the membrane a bit petulant), as 3N has learned to generate electricity from the internal movement of subatomic particles and is now fully self generating.
"We are playing Mozart 24x7 to it and have a team of scientists reading 3N the entire Harvard Classics library and all the world's books on philosophy and religion in hopes that it will decide that kindness and goodwill towards man is the way to go. If not, we have to figure out how to kill it before it kills all of us..."
northsails.com/armageddon/
Fifty Knots... and a Dispute
Twenty year old Sjoukje Bredenkamp (RSA) has entered the history books and has broken the mythical 50 knot barrier... or has she? Sailing at the French "ditch" specifically designed for speed sailing attempts, the young kiteboarder has broken all existing speed records on her Naish built kiteboard. Her speed over a 500 metre course of 50.13 knots has been ratified by the World Sailing Speed Record Council. But there are many observers who dispute the record... saying that for the last 50 metres she was not actually touching the water at all, but was, in fact, airborne at a height of at least 5 metres and simply blown through the finish gate before crashing, rather spectacularly.
"If it's a sailing record, one should be sailing" said Scottish boardsailor Beauregard "Skruggs" McTavish. "The outright airspeed record is a bit higher.. about 1000 knots higher. I could hear her screaming for help for the last 30 yards or so, no small accomplishment that, given how loud the wind was howling... but it's simply not sailing. Real men keep a fin in the water, that's all I will say for now..."
"I'm simply overwhelmed by it all" said the diminuitive South African kitesailor. "I knew it was going to be a fast run, it was all a bit of a blur near the end and then a huge gust grabbed the kite and it flung me up in the air and through the finish line before I really knew what happened. I couldn't hang on much longer and bailed out. Fortunately I was still over water at the time, I tucked, rolled and ended up flat on my back in about a foot of water, but no breaks, just a few bruises. Some of the boys here are a bit upset that a woman has taken the record. Get over it, and come join me for a pint, is my well-considered response..."
World Sailing Speed Record Council Secretary C. John Reed, on hand to observe Ms. Bredenkamp's historical run said: "This should not be that complicated. It's the position of the WSSRC that Ms. Bredenkamp has indeed broken the 50 knot barrier and the outright sailing speed record. It matters not that the last few metres she was fully airborne... with the state of hydrodynamics, foils and laminar flow on today's fastest craft, it's going to be almost impossible to determine if water is actually touching a physical surface at every moment of a record run. I've seen footage of sailboards where only the very tip of the skeg was in the water.. and sometimes not even that. How much water is actually 'touching' Hydroptere when it's up on the foils? Not much, is my reasoned opinion."
Asked if a fully airborne 500m record could fully count as a "sailing record", Reed replied, "No, but we're not talking about someone jumping off a cliff here... they start in water and end in water. If they want to be blown downwind at altitude for 499 metres more power (and records) to them. These are very brave men and women. It scares the bejabbers out of me just watching it."
www.sjoukjebredenkamp.nl
sailspeedrecords.com
Phoning It In
...is what sailing journalists in Qingdao will face this summer if recently proposed rules for telecommunications are enacted by the Chinese. Apparently fearful of espionage, Chinese Olympic officials are threatening to ban laptops, PDAs, Blackberries and all other forms of digital communication devices from incoming foreign press for the Olympics.
"They're not just going to scan my harddrive for naughty photos, as I expected to happen, they're threatening to confiscate my laptop at the airport and not ever return it" said one outraged SINS (Society of International Nautical Scribes) member. "How in hell's name am I supposed to file stories?"
"We are very concerned about the corrupting influence of Western internet culture on the citizenry of China" said China 2008 spokesman Goesuk Egs. "There are also some concerns about coaches accessing weather information and transmitting that somehow to athletes on the sailing courses, which we simply cannot allow."
One famed journalist is more sanguine about the proposed restrictions. Bob Fisher told Scuttlebutt Europe that while he would deem the loss of his laptop an inconvenience, "During the First and Second World Wars I would just telegraph or phone in reports, when fax's became available in the 80s it was a huge time saver. Instead of reading off the reports we'd scrawled on cocktail napkins we could just feed them into the machine and let the editors decipher them. Tried and tested technology, that. There won't be any wind or racing to report in from Qingdao anyway, I've got my entire 'Lack of Wind Cancels Sailing at 2008 Olympics' report already written..."
China, Tibet and the Wind Gods
Dharmsala, India: Representatives of the Dalai Lama today again denounced the recent violence in Tibet and the crackdown on dissident Buddhist monks in Lhasa. But they then gave an extraordinary account of a secret meeting recently held between His Holiness and Chinese officials wherein the Chinese agreed to autonomous rule for Tibet provided that the Dalai Lama and a team of Rinpoche's assure wind for the Olympic Sailing in Qingdao this summer.
"We were quite taken aback by their request" said one of the Dalai Lama's closest aides. "Tibetans have been flying 'prayer flags' for centuries... apparently the Chinese think that these are to propitiate some sort of wind god or gods and are quite keen on having us use this perceived force to bring at least 8 to 10 knots to Qingdao for the Olympics. They have delivered a series of pictograms that we're to have printed on every prayer flag in Tibet and here at the government in exile offices. I cannot read Chinese but have been told that they say 'Dear Wind God. Please visit Qingdao on August 9-21 or you'll never see the Pachen Lama again.' Quite remarkable, really, in that Buddhists don't have gods per se, they're just Buddha emanations. But if it gets us our country back, frankly, I think most monks would be willing to have that tatooed onto their backsides and run naked through the hilltops. Or we could get 50,000 monks to all pass wind in China's general direction simultaneously come August. That might help."
Let's See the Rating Fellows Solve This One
Cowes, UK: "More than meets the eye" is how one RORC Rating office official has deemed the recent exclusion of canting keels from this year's Cowes Week. "We've unearthed some very disturbing information that was kept from the IRC rating office for a few years, we're in the process of determining its validity, but if it's true, there could be some serious repurcussions for a number of owners... and a serious challenge to event organisers and rating offices around the world. Getting the canting keelers out of Cowes Week was the first step."
Scuttlebutt Europe has learned that this information involves a scheme amongst a handful of maxi canting keel sailboats to utilise a hitherto unknown secret British/US satellite to effectively reduce not just wetted area, but the boat's mass and intertia.
One boat owner who insisted on anonymity told us "We're doing our patriotic duty here... we were contacted by an intelligence unit of MI6 and asked if we'd install certain equipment in our keel bulbs to aid in attempts to perfect what is best described as a 'tractor beam' a la Star Trek.
"When we shift the keel bulb to windward, it connects to a geostationary satellite, which then activates the particle beam which 'lifts' the bulb and gives us a slight loss of weight but also a bit of forward thrust. The scientists have intimated that we're only on very low power, that if they dialed it up they could lift us out of the ocean and hurl us hundreds of yards. Here's hoping they're careful about that dial."
The ultimate goal would be to develop systems that could increase the fuel efficiency and top speed of warships... but in the meantime, it's unlikely that any major event is going to allow a canting keelboat anywhere near the start line without an inspection of the keel that one owner has disallowed based on a national security letter from MI6.
"Excluding a keel from an IRC rating inspection because of classified weaponry is really not something that our office has envisioned to date. We don't even know who to talk to about it. So we're taking the only step we can and for the time being, banning canting keels from all RORC races, period." said the RORC's Mike Urwin.
rorcrating.com
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
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