USA17 reaches her spiritual home

Monster 33rd America's Cup winning trimaran arrives in San Francisco

The giant America’s Cup-winning trimaran arrived in the Bay today aboard the freighter M.V. Star Isfjord after a 7,900-mile passage from Valencia, Spain, via the Panama Canal.

The ship carrying USA 17 passed underneath the Golden Gate Bridge at 0530 PST and berthed alongside San Francisco's Pier 80 at 0650.

The timing of unloading the game-changing 115ft long trimaran and its wingsail will be determined by prevailing wind conditions. Both will be placed in short term storage in Oracle Racing’s new base on Pier 80. Longer term, there are plans to put the yacht and her impressive 223-foot wingsail on public display.

The trimaran may not sail again, her place in history assured by two brief, glorious moments in February 2010. USA 17 has only ever contested two races in her life, winning both convincingly to claim the 33rd America's Cup from Alinghi.

In doing so, she propelled the America’s Cup into a new era of fast, exciting wingsailed multihull featuring shorter, simpler-to-understand racing and pioneering television graphics.

“When we stepped off the boat last year it was a really flat feeling that lasted several weeks,” commented skipper James Spithill. “We realised that we might not sail the boat again. There was such a buzz in sailing a machine so big and which pushed so many boundaries. But she was also ‘high-maintenance’ and right now our priority is the future, not the past.”

Oracle Racing’s focus is now on the 34th America's Cup. Scheduled for San Francisco in the summer of 2013, it will showcase similar wingsail multihull technology that made USA 17 so exciting. The team’s new AC45 catamaran, used for the 2011 and 2012 America’s Cup World Series events, is nearing completion, while the design, sailing, engineering and boatbuilding teams are flat-out developing concepts for the team’s bigger AC72 catamaran for the defense of the America’s Cup.

USA 17’s arrival is her first visit to the city that Oracle Racing calls home.

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