America's Cup - Stopwatches out for USA team

4:46 AM Sun 31 Jan 2010 GMT

'Valencia (ESP) - 33rd America's Cup - BMW ORACLE Racing' BMW Oracle Racing &copy Photo Gilles Martin-Raget Click Here to view large photo

America's Cup- ticking the boxes. Saturday was a big day for the BMW Oracle Racing team, which left its mooring in Valencia, aboard their giant trimaran USA at 08:30 and didn't return from their office until nine hours later.

Glenn Ashby and Darren Bundock (right) 2009 Tornado World Champions -

Australian Glen Ashby, the six times A-Cat Class Catamaran World Champion and 2009 Tornado World Champion and Olympic silver medallist has been a regular coach for the USA skipper and fellow Australian James Spithill, the BMW Oracle helmsman and skipper over the last few seasons, as Spithill began to come to grips with cat sailing.

Ashby is the BMW Oracle sailing team coach and the pace is stepping up as the first race of the 33rd America's Cup is now just eight days away.

Saturday's sailing began with a blast reach under wing sail and headsail in blustery conditions, taking the trimaran USA nearly ten miles offshore. 'I think today would have to be our best day in Valencia and to be honest, it would be up there all time, in terms of ticking things off the 'to do' list,' said Ashby at the end of the day.

Last night Ashby reported ' 'Early on, we sailed in quite a lot of breeze. We had high 20s at times at the top of the mast just before we got going and it was still right up there for the first hour or so.'

' The team decided to back off for a short time to allow the wind to settle, but then spent the rest of the day in race training mode in moderate winds.

'We did some top mark rounding drills, setting up and getting timelines down for those. We got the stopwatch out for quite a few inline sail changes and those were improving all day.

'We worked on a lot of our systems for boat handling and the crew work is getting quite good now, so as far as taking a few steps up the ladder, today was fantastic.'

The team will be spending as much time on the water as the weather allows, over the next week.

Sail-World.com will be reporting in detail from Valencia, with images, interviews and race reports for its world-wide sailing news network, with detailed coverage on Sail-World USA, Sail-World Canada, Sail-World Europe, Sail-World UK, Sail-World Asia, Sail-World New Zealand and Sail-World Australia.