Mark Chisnell's Diary

The former editor of madforsailing writes from Seattle with the second of his accounts of the team’s preparation for the 2003 America’s Cup

After a couple of months in the office working on our new instrument and tactical computer systems, I managed to unchain myself from the desk and get over to the UK to race in Skandia Life Cowes Week and the America’s Cup Jubilee Regatta.
A compulsory and unplanned stop-over in Minneapolis meant that I missed the first race, but I was almost grateful by the end - seven straight days and it was beginning to feel like Groundhog Day.

Cowes Week must be one of the longest popular regattas running without a break. Shortening the event to six days, starting on the Sunday and finishing with the fireworks on Friday night, would seem to make a lot of sense when time is the resource that many owners and crew are most short of. Another option would be to make Wednesday a lay day so people can check in with the office mid-week.

I sailed with Kevin Sproul aboard Glyn William’s Wolf, and it was disappointing to find ourselves racing in the IRC 1 Division in an IC 45. As I arrived in England after the regatta started, I don’t know the background to the decision by the organizers to abandon a separate start for IRM and lump the entries into the IRC fleets - with IRM scoring for those with certificates.

I understand that the reason was that there wasn’t enough support for an IRM class - but how did we get into this situation? There were plenty of appropriate boats out in the Solent during Cowes Week. And a single IRM class that included everything from the Ker One Designs through the IC 45s to the Farr 52s would have been a great advert for the rule. Especially as the movers and shakers of world sailing were pouring into town for the Fastnet and ahead of the Jubilee.

Instead of which, the IRM class was a virtual non-event that didn’t even get scored for the first couple of days. This was a great opportunity that went begging, and may well be the first ring of the death knell for IRM.

Ok, enough moaning, onto the Jubilee, in which I raced with Jeremy Robinson aboard Nick Hewson’s Team Tonic, and this was a fabulous event. In a year when the Admiral’s Cup fizzled out of existence, the sailing world came to the Solent anyway - for what must have been just about the greatest-ever gathering of sailboat racing hardware - and got treated to a superbly organized and well-supported event.