The British team’s extraordinarily technical prototype test platform, ‘T6’ launched into some ‘extreme’ swells in Barcelona today where the sheer skill of the sailors was thoroughly tested as they rocketed around the racecourse area, trying to make sense of the, at times, two metre swells.
The last time ‘T6’ was in action was back on the 15th June in Palma, Mallorca but the team trained on their one design AC40 last week and are getting fully acclimatised to life in Barcelona at their new, impressive base in the heart of the Port Vell. Today’s session was billed as a ‘commissioning sail’ but proved to be far more with T6 absolutely on rails with the wind speed that built and faded through the day between 8-15 knots never really matching the lumpy, confused easterly-running sea state.
It was anything but easy. The swell was simply extraordinary and challenging for the 40 foot length of T6 with Giles Scott and Dylan Fletcher-Scott really having to sail over the wave-forms upwind almost as if they were back in dinghies. Huge credit to Luke Parkinson and Iain Jensen who were playing the mainsail track relentlessly and in high-co-ordination with their helms’ courses whilst downwind they dared with high flight that was almost scary to watch. A few touchdowns and some big angles on gybes were to be expected but ultimately those dunks damaged the manoeuvre percentages with 58% being either foil-to-foil or touch and go
