Bad day gets worse for Cup holders 'Team New Zealand'

Bad day gets worse for Cup holders 'Team New Zealand'

Paul Tait, Reuters, Auckland, New Zealand

The first day of holder Team New Zealand's America's Cup defense against Swiss challenger Alinghi began badly and got steadily worse as their hi-tech boat suffered a series of breakages on Saturday.

Team New Zealand handed Alinghi a 1-0 lead when they pulled out on the opening leg of the first race of the best-of-nine series on the Hauraki Gulf off Auckland with a broken boom, torn sails and calf-deep water washing around the aft deck.

Syndicate head Tom Schnackenberg estimated up to six tones of water washed into the boat, forcing it lower in the water and causing a chain reaction of gear breakages.

"We've got engineers working on it right now," Schnackenberg told reporters. "We think we'll be fine but we're not taking it lightly."

The mishaps robbed thousands of eager New Zealand fans of the chance to see whether the Cup holder's radical new hull design, which features an appendage designed to increase overall waterline length and reduce drag, had a significant speed advantage over Ernesto Bertarelli's Alinghi.

Skipper Dean Barker said his black NZL-82 boat suffered a problem with its foresail before the start of the race and it quickly began taking on water in steep seas whipped up by winds of up to 25 knots and thousands of spectator craft.

"It was a bit of a shock to us to have the leeward side of the boat pretty much full of water after only about eight or nine minutes of sailing," Barker told a news conference.

"It just went from bad to worse. It wasn't ideal, it was definitely hurting us at the end," he said.

Team New Zealand's boat was towed ignominiously back to the syndicate's base, the crew sitting in silence with heads bowed.

The crew earlier bailed out calf-deep water using a blue bucket normally used as a toilet but the extra weight led to a series of gear breakages, including a broken boom.

"It certainly felt like it was a losing battle there for a while," Team New Zealand mid-bowman Matthew Mitchell said. "We were quite fortunate the bucket was there at all."

The boat's mainsail also tore and the headsail blew out spectacularly, forcing the Cup holders to pull out of the race after 25 minutes as Alinghi safely sailed around the course to take a 1-0 lead.

"Typically when something does go wrong...it does load up other parts of the boat," said Barker. "It's pretty disappointing when that happens."

Barker said his crew had never seen so much water come into their boat during their long months of training.