On The Glory Trail
11-Jul-2007
Former Team New Zealand and K Challenge America's Cup sailor Cameron Appleton will bolster the afterguard on John Buchan's Glory this season, joining the Seattle based team as tactician.
The Alicante MedCup debutants left their first regatta objective but slightly disappointed with their performance, finishing up 23rd after retiring from race 3 with a forestay issue.
"It was a great event and we really enjoyed it." Notes Glory's boat captain Andrew Koch, "We learned a lot and that should serve us well for the future. We have been doing a lot of work on the boat in Alicante since the last regatta. We have changed the reinforcing on the forward bulkhead which gave us problems, and updated the inhaulers on the jib cars so we have a system which is like others, so we should, I hope be good for the next event."
As well as adding Appleton, Glory will have Phil Hammer, who sailed on the VO70 ABN AMRO on mainsheet, and Shosholoza sail designer Chris Williams as regular jib trimmer. More significantly Koch believes they have also sorted out their rig settings which were off in Alicante.
"We will have some of our regular crew back, also including Stu McLaughlin and Scott Smith. Our crew work was good in Alicante but we really did not have the rig set up right. We blew up the forestay and the whole rig tune was out of whack, and that really took until the end of the event to get it sorted, but by then I felt like when we were up against other boats we were OK for speed. By the last day we had our speeds and point back. Once we started matching speed with other boats we seemed to do OK, but we were really slow to get there. I am pretty confident we will be able to match them in Mallorca and I believe we now have our rig sorted out. Now that we have made these changes we should be good for a middle of the fleet finish. I think we have it dialled now and should get four days of crew training before the Regatta Breitling starts."
Original MedCup Article