Our Man at Sail GP

Jan 23, 2025
By Michael Smith
AUCKLAND – The City of Sails is a sea of motorboats; Big towering jobs with helipads, little 8-foot tin boats, power cats, and everything in between, are all packed with people and anchored cheek by jowl on the edges of the Waitemata Harbour.
It’s SailGP race weekend, the first ever in this city, and the enormous spectator fleet reflects a growing interest in the events. For me, it’s a chance to see in person what has been, until now, a television event.
But to find an anchorage with a clear view our family’s 10-metre sloop, Above the Fold, has to contend with what seems like most of the launches in a city that has reportedly one boat for every five citizens.
For the uninitiated, “launch” is the Kiwi term for any boat without sails; our modest sailboat is a “yacht” – a word applied to everything from a kid’s training dinghy to a tall-masted billionaire’s toy.
There are a few yachts on the scene – including some biggies – but it’s mostly launches.
Eventually we do find a good place to anchor. But when we settle down, we see we’re really crowding some other boats, and we have somehow migrated away from the front row. So, grandson Liam is up to the bow, raising the hook so we can try again.
It takes a few tries, but we are finally settled – a bit close to a 40-foot launch and a moored, abandoned-looking sailboat – but we do have a great view of the first turning mark and the upwind gate.
Now it’s time to amuse ourselves because – to avoid the crowds! – we have arrived about three and a half hours before the racing starts. It seems we were not the only ones with that idea.
Luckily four of the crew are teenagers with the Kiwi love of the water, so they are amused for a couple of hours swinging on the spinnaker halyard and dropping into the water. The sun is shining, the wind is hitting 17 knots, the Admiral has made sandwiches, the beer is cold. Life is really good.
This regatta has some important changes. If you’ve followed the sport on TV or perhaps got to Halifax for last year’s summer’s event, you know the format: Three fleet races on Saturday, followed by two more on Sunday – Super Sunday, in the broadcasters’ excited language – followed by a final race among the top three finishers.
With an expanded fleet – 12 F50 foiling catamarans on the start line need a lot of room – the organizers have a new plan: they’ll divide the fleet into two groups and have six fleet races the first day, followed by four more the next day to arrive at the three-boat final.
That had been the plan for Auckland, but at the last minute the French boat was unable to go, so 11 boats came out for fleet races on Saturday and Sunday.
There is also an equipment change. The boats until now have had L-shaped foils but the engineers have come up with T-shaped titanium foils that promise to give higher speeds, at the price of being a bit touchier to control.
The new foils, combined with the expected heavy air, led British tactician Hannah Mills to predict there could be “carnage” on the water. Fans will know that she was right, especially on the Sunday, when my wind speed indicator rarely dropped below 20 knots and the outgoing tide competing with an easterly breeze made for a challenging sea state.
Several F50s danced on the edge of capsizing during the fleet races as Above the Fold hobby-horsed, tugging sharply on the anchor chain.
The wind and sea led to disappointment: Canadian flight controller Billy Gooderham was injured during practice runs and the team had to scrub the day. (a next day update of Gooderham’s examination showed he apparently was bruised but nothing was broken.) But on Above the Fold, we’re a mixed Kiwi-Canuck family; we just switched our loyalties to the Black Foils, who got a rousing chorus of air horns every time they came near the spectators.
Giles Scott, the new driver of the Canadian team, had told me that the most obvious difference between the old and new foils is the noise – the new ones have a high-pitched wail that reminded one of my crew of the sound of an X-Wing starfighter in the Star Wars movies.
That scream is unnerving, especially when an F50 is coming directly toward you: even though you know it will turn away, there’s a reflexive urge to duck.
The new foil shape also means the boats are effectively wider, so they need a bit more space; another reason for the new format.
I had previously watched SailGP on television and it was a revelation to see how big and fast the boats are up close and personal. On TV, Scott said, “Everything looks smaller, it looks like there’s a lot more space, and everything looks slower.” But even spectators watching them up close don’t really get it, he added.
“They look extremely fast. They feel even faster.”
For those of us who go out on Wednesday nights for some around-the-cans racing, the SailGP stuff seems like another world.
“In many ways the boats are as different as sailing boats get,” Scott said,. “On the other hand, what wins races is exactly the same” – doing the little things right more often than the competition.
The team had mixed results on the Saturday and didn’t get a chance to put Scott’s formula into action on that bouncy Sunday., Gooderham was slammed by a “wall of water” during an unexpected touchdown, team CEO Phil Kennard said in an online statement, and was taken to hospital for x-rays.
But for SailGP fans the weekend was a huge success. The 8,000-seat grandstand, erected on the shore of the city’s lively Wynyard Quarter, was sold out each day. Thousands more watched from the sailing clubs and breakwall of Westhaven Marina.
And on both days, SailGP estimated, more than 4,000 people watched, as we did, from their own boats.
A Chat with Canada’s New Driver

Giles Scott, the new driver for the Canadian SailGP team, was not expecting to jump ship. He had been the driver for Emirates GBR, the British team, and had what he called a “positive finish” last season – a finish that he expected to build on in this year.
He initially turned down an offer from team CEO Phil Kennard, he told me in the run-up to the Auckland SaiGP regatta.
What changed his mind, he said, was that the team was under the new ownership of biotech entrepreneur Greg Bailey, MD “I found the option of being involved in something quite new and fresh very appealing,” he said.
He was also attracted by the team’s weCANfoil youth program, which has had more than 2,300 young people out on the water in foiling boats since it was established in 2022. The program offers clinics and coaching in 12 hubs across Canada, according to team spokesman Hugo Chartier.
The jump put Scott in the driver’s seat formerly occupied by Kiwi Phil Robertson, but the rest of the team is “largely unchanged,” he said, and the focus for the past few months has been “getting to know each other.”
Will the team compete differently than it did under Robertson, who was sometimes criticized for being too aggressive? “It’s a balancing act,” Scott said. “There’s a line out there and sometimes teams go over it.”
“Races aren’t often won by something massively spectacular,”: he said. “They’re won by being cleaner, (making) fewer mistakes, getting off the start line well, keeping the tempo down on board.”