The America's Cup Flip

America's Cup sailboat AC45 tumbles across the bay, makes a splash on the evening news...

Photo Gilles Martin-Raget

You may have caught a five second clip on the nightly news Tuesday of a sailboat doing a partial somersault across San Francisco Bay. We saw it, and wanted to see more... learn what happened, see a longer video, find out if yacht races always have such spectacular crashes...

What Happened
The San Francisco Examiner was on the scene and reported that the two AC45s (45-foot catamarans owned by Oracle Racing) were running practice races at the Golden Gate Yacht Club, and that one of the boats tipped over as the vessels jockeyed for position to begin a race. "Tipped over" sounds mild compared to what we saw.

Design Challenges?
A blog post about the incident at Messing About In Sailboats helped us find a longer clip of the flip on YouTube (see below for video). That post also had some good insight into the design challenges that this type of boat faces, and how messy it might get when the larger AC72 yachts race for the America's Cup in San Francisco in 2013.

Here's the video...



More News
The 2013 event should be in the news again on Wednesday (6/15) as the official America's Cup competitor slate is to be revealed in San Francisco at 10:30 a.m. PT, but there probably won't be any surprises. Stay tuned to the Daily Boater for more America's Cup updates.

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