KEY POINTS:
We were beginning to get the feeling Adam Beashel and Ray Davies could find a wind shift in a goldfish bowl.
Dangerous words, perhaps, as the one thing everyone in the 32nd America's Cup match is agreed on is that Valencia's unpredictable winds are frighteningly tough to judge - and today's triumph could be tomorrow's humiliation.
And yesterday's fourth race, won smoothly by Alinghi, saw the New Zealanders unable to find a wind shift significant enough to get them past the Swiss.
But if this remarkable match was boxing, Emirates Team New Zealand would be ahead on points, with the canny left jab of the Kiwis' shift-spotting abilities reddening the nose of the Alinghi defenders on a regular basis.
In spite of Alinghi going all whingey and calling it "luck", as they did after the remarkable third race, it is strange how the luckier team also seem to be the more skilled.
Alinghi sailed a much tighter, more watchful race to even up the series at 2-2 yesterday and managed to guard against the Kiwis spotting a big wind shift and racing away.
But there is no doubt that the Kiwi weather team and afterguard have been meshing together well.
Beashel comes from the yachting nursery that breeds so many sailors able to spot what is completely invisible to landlubbers - the wind on the water - so the crew can position the boat to take advantage of any shifts. That nursery is dinghy sailing.
Beashel's brother Colin was an Olympic bronze medallist in the Star class (and a member of Australia II). His father Ken is a former world 18ft skiff champion. His wife, Lanee, is an Olympic boardsailor.
So his ability to read the wind is both in his DNA and honed by practice.
"I believe that a little," he said when asked if the skill is born in a sailor rather than made. "There are a whole lot of dinghy sailors who have won and lost regattas on the basis of their ability to pick the wind. That's where you develop it, I guess.
"When you are up the mast, it's harder to see wind shifts up there; but you can pick pressure."
Former Olympic yachtsman and New Zealand Olympic yachting team manager Ralph Roberts is in no doubt that the skill is innate.
"I could always look on the water and see what I call 'wind roads'," he said. "But I have no idea how I could do that. It was just there. I couldn't train it or anything."
Legendary dinghy sailor Paul Elvstrom of Denmark (one of only three Olympians to win the same event four times, in the Finn class) took one look at the New Zealand pairing of Rex Sellers and Chris Timms in the Tornado class and said they would win the gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. They did.
Elvstrom, when asked why, said: "That man [Sellers] can read the water even better than I can."
Beashel does his job up the mast and from the deck. He looks for different colorations on the water and for ripples that give away - to him - the direction of the wind. It is a delicate art and, in this America's Cup, often a vital advantage over the opposition.
Much has been said about the care and excruciating detail amassed by the on-shore weather team led by Roger "Clouds" Badham and the on-board "spotting" by Beashel and strategist Ray Davies, whose weather eye and all-encompassing calmness is the "glue" in the Team New Zealand afterguard.
The team have a mass of data and statistics to the extent that they can look back over a specific day in Valencia and assess the winds on that day, extracting any patterns that might be found. They also have the experience gathered over months of racing here, using the MDS weather system, weather boats and onshore watchers - all that information channelled to the boat through Davies.
"There was certainly a bit of dice-rolling," said Davies after that memorable third race. "There's a certain amount of luck involved ... but there's certainly a pattern there as well."
Not everyone agreed.
"Lottery."
"Might as well have been tiddlywinks."
"Toss a coin."
"Not fair."
"We just want a good, even boat race in consistent conditions."
All that from Alinghi's hard-bitten Kiwi pitman Dean Phipps.
Or this: "Las Vegas."
"Do you want to bet on red or black?"
"We were just unlucky."
"I don't think the wind should decide a regatta; the competitors should decide a regatta on their ability." Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Ernesto Bertarelli, boss of Alinghi and the man who chose Valencia as the venue for the America's Cup because of its supposedly consistent winds.
However, another Alinghi Kiwi, Simon Daubney, may have made the most pertinent observation about the importance of the weather game in that race and perhaps in this regatta.
"I'm not too sure about their weather call. If they had a clear call that the wind was going to go 20 degrees right on the first beat, then that is certainly something that our weather team hadn't picked up," he said.
"So maybe it wasn't a lottery and maybe their weather team did better than ours but we certainly weren't expecting that much of a shift and that much of a velocity change."
