Team Invictus head for America

With BMW Oracle Racing still pondering whether or not the 34th America’s Cup should be held in monohulls (the popular choice with teams) or multihulls (the technically progressive choice), so an unpredicted amount of focus is set to be placed on the Little America’s Cup, taking place in Newport, Rhode Island over 22-28 August. For as it says on the tin, this is lining up to be a '33rd America’s Cup-lite' in the smaller 25ft long, 14ft wide C-Class catamarans, although unlike this spring’s event in Valencia there are to be six or seven boats. There is also the significant design parameter difference in that C-Class cats are limited to a maximum of 300sqft of sail area. This limit means firstly that they don’t use headsails or kites, but also that their solid wingsails are more complex than the towering wing we saw on the BMW Oracle Racing tri. In short they are the most efficient sailing machines on the water. Perhaps it heralds multihulls’ coming of age, but there is another feature of this event, almost unimaginable 10 years ago: It is being hosted by the New York Yacht Club. This is like the Royal Yacht Squadron staging the next Moth World Championship. The competition will essentially be between two large teams. One is American Steve Clark, winner with Cogito in 1996 against the Australian team in Yellow Pages The Edge III and successful defender again with Cogito on Narragansett Bay in 2004. The other is Canadian Fred Eaton, who mounted a successful challenge on Alpha in 2007. The majority of the boats competing originate from these two teams – Eaton built two new boats for the 2007 event, his winning Alpha and the foiler Off yer Rocker and has two new ones for this year’s event – Orion and