Sailing suspended for review of boats

Clouds hung over the America’s Cup sailing regatta after investigators asked the teams to temporarily halt practising on Friday at blustery San Francisco Bay following a deadly accident earlier this month.

Organisers have said races will go ahead in July, despite growing public concerns over safety after a British champion sailor was killed when one of the sleek, ultra-fast AC72 catamarans built for the competition capsized and broke apart on May 10.

They have left open the possibility of changes to the rules of the race, brought to San Francisco by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, whose team won the trophy in the 2010 event in Valencia, Spain.

After its first meeting on Thursday, a committee formed by organisers to review Swedish challenger Artemis Racing’s fatal accident asked the teams to suspend sailing both the 72-foot America’s Cup catamarans and the smaller AC45s until the middle of this week.

Organisers have said they hoped to have recommendations from the committee within about two weeks.

Among other factors, investigators will look at the structure of Artemis’s “Big Red” yacht, which Regatta Director Iain Murray has said differed significantly from the catamarans of other competitors.

Teams in the America’s Cup are required to stay within rules governing the design of their yachts but they also have leeway to customise their vessels with hydrofoils and other technology.

The death of Andrew Simpson, a two-time Olympic medallist, marked the second time that an expert crew on one of the high-tech yachts, estimated to cost around $8 million each, lost control and flipped their boat in the heavy winds and rip currents of San Francisco Bay.

Simpson was trapped underwater after the Artemis catamaran turned upside down and broke apart while training.

Winds had been blowing on the water at 18 to 20 knots, or about 23 to 25 miles per hour, which race organisers described as typical for the bay.

The America’s Cup rules allow the winner of the most recent event – in this case Ellison’s team – to choose the venue and regulations for the next challenge, a series of races that begin in July and go into September.

Hoping to attract wider interest in the sport, Ellison’s Oracle Team USA created specifications that led to ultra-lightweight, two-hulled vessels with hard “wing” sails and hydrofoils that can lift most of the boat out of the water to reach speeds close to 80 kph.

But following the Artemis accident and an incident in October when Oracle’s catamaran capsized and was swept out to sea, criticism has grown that the boats may be too hard to manoeuvre in San Francisco’s Bay’s heavy winds and rip currents.

C.W. Nevius, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, urged race officials to switch to the AC45s, which were used last year in early competitor eliminations, instead of the AC72s.

“The 72-foot catamarans are too much, too big, too powerful. Most of all, they are too dangerous,” Nevius wrote.

“Someone needs to make a hard choice and say the race will go back to the 45-foot catamarans that raced last summer.”

While Oracle has two AC72s, and Artemis has a second yacht that it has yet to launch in San Francisco Bay, Luna Rossa has only one.

The fourth team in the America’s Cup this year, Emirates Team New Zealand, has only one fully commissioned AC72.