Cup correspondent for the NZ Herald, Julie Ash, wrote a nice story for the Monday morning edition about our team breaking camp in VLC and heading for AKL....


Yachting: Oracle breezing into City of Sails
Monday November 6, 2006
By Julie Ash

America's Cup syndicate BMW Oracle Racing are on their way to Auckland, having wound up their sailing programme in Valencia.

The syndicate, headed by US computer billionaire Larry Ellison, will train in Auckland from mid-November until around February. The syndicate have so far shipped one boat here (2003- generation boat) USA71. It is not known whether they intend to fly or ship any of their new boats to New Zealand.

Since February, Oracle have sailed more than 150 days in Valencia, which has included performance testing, crew training, in-house racing as well as competing in the three Cup pre-regattas. The team launched their first new boat USA87 earlier this year which they raced in two of the pre-regattas. The construction of the team's second 2007-generation yacht continues in Anacortes, Seattle.

Chief executive and skipper Chris Dickson said they set an ambitious programme at the start of the year and felt they achieved their goals.

Full story


Should be interesting to have two of the top challengers training in the same waters over the next few months. Remains to be seen how much, if at all, we might sail against one another. Most of the Challengers have trained together in VLC at one time or another, including ourselves and ETNZ before they left in August.

As a group the Challengers remain as tight or tighter than at any time in my 25+ years of Cup involvement. This has translated into concerted efforts by the Challengers on and off the water. As always it will take a number of very good Challengers going at it hammer and tongs before and during the LVC to hone one of us to be good enough to take on and defeat what no doubt is and will be a very capable Team Alinghi.