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Outside Magaine November 2002

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Knives in the Water
Clip in and hang on for the 31st America's Cup—a game of skill, guile, wealth, power, pettiness, paranoia, espionage, and egomania. And the sailing's not bad, either.

By Tim Zimmermann


	Stars and Stripes: With Ken Read at the helm, Team Dennis Conner launches into a practice race. (Jeff Reidel)

"TWO SAILS, DEAD AHEAD," helicopter pilot Marty White says over the intercom. "And two more towards Auckland." White, 31, is a beefy, cool-talking Kiwi who has logged many hours on risky mountain-transport operations, and our preflight safety briefing was short and simple. "Don't let anything fly out the open doors," he drawled, glancing at our loose photographic gear. "You might take out the tail rotor."

Cruising high above New Zealand's Hauraki Gulf, a 40-mile circle of sparkling green water near Auckland, you see a sweeping South Pacific panorama that stretches from the city's

Photo Gallery

VIEW EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS OF THE AMERICA'S CUP CHALLENGERS IN ACTION HERE

glistening office towers to the lush Whangaparaoa Peninsula in the north. But we're not playing tourist on this July afternoon, in the dead of the New Zealand winter. We're on a recon mission to check out the nautical hardware that's being tuned up for the most competitive and expensive race on water: the 31st America's Cup. From a thousand feet up, it's easy to spot the sleek racing machines that we're stalking, as they tack and jibe on the water below. We clatter toward the first pair of boats at more than a hundred knots.

It's still ten weeks before the qualifying races kick off on October 1, and the actual America's Cup, a silver goblet weighing almost 30 pounds, won't be awarded until February, following a climactic kill-or-be-killed duel between a battle-dented challenger and the Cup's defender, Team New Zealand. But the 19 new Cup-class yachts that will fight for the trophy are the most sophisticated racers that money, technology, and human ingenuity can produce, and with a half-billion dollars invested, they're treated like top-secret weapons systems. Even taking pictures is mostly forbidden, so catching them in action calls for a slightly unorthodox approach—in this case a chartered Bell 206B JetRanger III.

White drops in near the stiletto-thin, charcoal-black hulls of Oracle BMW Racing's two yachts and settles into a hover. The boats spin and circle each other, the sun glinting off their sails as they engage in a pre-start dance. Faces aboard the Oracle RIBs—the high-powered rigid inflatable boats that constantly swarm around the racing craft—turn skyward to identify the intruder. But the sailors are too busy with their practice race to take much notice, and hit the starting line just as the gun fires. After watching them knife upwind for a few minutes, it's time we moved on.

"Let's go find OneWorld," I say, and White smoothly spins the chopper in the direction of two indigo-blue hulls in the distance.



	The stealth yacht's of Oracle BMW Racing in New Zealand's Hauraki Gulf. (Jeff Reidel)

Within minutes White has us hovering just above the Hauraki wavelets as the 80-foot yachts of the OneWorld Challenge syndicate accelerate toward us. An RIB breaks from the pack and roars our way, a crewman waving his arms wildly to shoo us off. We rise into the sky, and the boats continue up the racecourse. Finally, the sailors can tolerate our presence no longer. The two boats break off their practice, headsails shivering down to the deck.

We drift back toward Oracle, but a call comes in on the VHF. The team has contacted White's base at North Shore Helicopters to order us to back off. When we eventually touch down again at the airfield, I switch on my cell phone, and the display shows four calls from OneWorld. Word of our airborne stunt has already traveled across the Pacific to the Seattle home of Bob Ratliffe, OneWorld's executive director, and he's pissed. He unloads into my voice mail: "You didn't have permission to be up there taking pictures of our boats!"

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Correspondent Tim Zimmermann is the author of The Race (2001).

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