Local knowledge aids Kiwi sailing win on San Diego Bay
Rod Davis was eight years old the first time he sailed across San Diego Bay with his father in 1963.
The late Whit Davis was a submariner in the Navy and one of the area’s best at negotiating the tricky conditions on and around San Diego Bay with a sailboat.
Plus, being from Coronado, the Davises spent many hours battling the tidal conditions and wind shifts of San Diego Bay.
“Even if we were sailing out in the ocean, we had to sail up the bay to get to the courses,” Rod Davis remembered Sunday.
“Sailing on San Diego Bay is always a balancing act. You’ve got the current. And you have the normal winds doing funny things as they come off North Island and Point Loma.
“Sailing on San Diego Bay can be tricky.”
Rod Davis went from being a junior champion to an Olympic gold medalist to an international superstar in sailing.
And although he’s been away from San Diego for much of the last 30 years – Davis returned for the three America’s Cups defended here as the coach of New Zealand in 1988, the skipper of challenger runnerup New Zealand in 1992 and the helmsman of the OneAustralia challenger that sunk in 1995 -- it doesn’t take him long to be reminded about the nuances of the place when he returns.
“All the little tweaks of San Diego Bay started coming back to me last spring when we raced the RC-44 sloops over the same course,” said Davis. “Those races refreshed my memory.”
Over the past week, as coach of the New Zealand team challenging for the 2013 America’s Cup, Davis passed along his local knowledge to the Emirates Team New Zealand crew gather here for the America’s Cup World Series.
Sunday afternoon, Kiwi skipper Dean Barker said he applied the information passed down from Davis to help win the six-race Port Cities Challenge prelim to next week’s America’s Cup World Series event.
Of course, winning in San Diego is nothing new to the Kiwis. Team New Zealand dominates sailing in San Diego when it comes to events with “America’s Cup” in the title. It was the Russell Coutts-led Kiwis who in 1995 removed the America’s Cup from San Diego with, perhaps, the most dominating campaign in America’s Cup history.
If anything has changed, it is the Kiwi crew. Barker and the Kiwi team didn’t arrive in San Diego until Friday. And none of the five Kiwis on the 45-New Zealand catamaran sailed in the 1995 America’s Cup. Barker had never sailed in San Diego before the weekend. Besides, the three San Diego America’s Cup defenses were sailed in the ocean off Point Loma and not on San Diego Bay.
Barker’s first impression of sailing on San Diego Bay?
“It’s hard racing on this bay,” said Barker, who was at the helm of New Zealand in 2000 when the boat completed its successful defense of the America’s Cup in Auckland.
“The track is very difficult with the current and the wind. It’s a one-sided sailing track making it a quite tricky venue. The light, patchy winds and the tide punishes mistakes.”
Barker knows. He packed a weekend of mistakes into Sunday afternoon’s second of four races, committing two fouls in addition to an out of bounds penalty. Due to the problems, Barker’s boat finished seventh among the nine boats in the race.
But Barker rallied to place second in each of the final two races to win the Port Cities Challenge.
“Davis gave us a lot of information about what to expect from the wind and the tide,” said Barker. “It made a big difference.”
The current was flowing out of the bay at around 1½-half knots for much of Sunday’s racing while the wind was coming at from 6-10 knots from a 90-degree angle.
“It’s tricky,” said Davis. “But it becomes more logical if you know what to expect.”
New Zealand, which leads the America’s Cup World Series standings coming into San Diego, sailed a 2-3-1-7-2-2 series in the Port Cities Cup to score a seven-point victory over the James Spithill-skippered Oracle team (3-8-2-5-3-3).
The Swedish Artemis catamaran, which is skippered by American Terry Hutchinson, finished third and was the only boat to win two races in the preliminary series. The two French teams, both of which won a race, finished fourth and fifth.
The next two days are devoted to practice and maintenance with the America’s Cup World Series officially beginning Wednesday with fleet races and time trials held on courses between the Broadway Pier and the eastern tip of Harbor Island.
