Four Years Later, Better Result

It was a throw away phrase during the lead up to the 2013 America’s Cup: the AC72s were so extreme that someone could die. And then someone did.

With news helicopters quickly to the scene on May 9, 2013, the crumbled mass of Artemis Racing’s boat had taken the life of Andrew Simpson.

So when news broke in Bermuda that Artemis Racing had again sustained beam damage whilst training for the 35th America’s Cup, those faded memories returned.

The team was not forthcoming on the details except that there were no injuries in the incident, and the yacht was their test boat, T2, a modified AC45 the team used to help train for the 49-foot America’s Cup Class yacht.

But there were questions about the wing as it was for their ACC boat. Skipper Nathan Outteridge finally reports on the details:

“On Tuesday (Apr. 4, 2017) we suffered structural damage to our test boat. Luckily everyone was fine and the guys did a great job of firstly looking after the people and then secondly looking after the equipment.

“The salvage team did an awesome job of getting all the key components back onto shore. The wing hardly had a scratch on it. There will be some repairs to be made and some checks to be done on it but we’ve got it back in the shed that night. It was just fine.

“There were some components on that boat that will be spare parts for the race yacht which we also salvaged and so from a situation like that, we did a really good job of recovering people and assets.

“It was coming to the end of our two boat training and we had got quite a lot out of sailing the two boats together and we were in the phase of winding that down. Now we’re into focusing on the race book and winding it up for the racing in May.”