Yachting: Dalton ticks the boxes - now for the big one

When Grant Dalton was appointed head of Team New Zealand in 2003 he believed his reign would be judged on three things.

The first was whether he could raise $130 million to fund a challenge, the second was his appointment of the design team and the third his selection of the afterguard.

Six months out from the challenger series, the syndicate is fully funded as of six weeks ago, the first of the new black boats, NZL84, was close to, if not, the fastest in this year's racing and his sailors look confident and composed.

If Dalton was holding his breath, he can now exhale.

"We should never be happy, we should always be striving," he said from his team's base in Auckland.

"But if you had said to me this time last year that you could be the top boat, and not by fluke, and sailing really well by this stage, yes I'd be happy.

"But to say that I am happy would indicate you slow down for a second and we are not slowing, if anything, we are rarking the pace up."

After six months in Valencia, Emirates Team NZ are home for four months. Their final boat, NZL92, has been delivered and should be ready for sailing in over a week's time.

Once structural soundness is verified, it will be raced against NZL84 - a yacht recently described by Alinghi managing director Grant Simmer as radical.

To the untrained eye, the most visible developments so far in this cup are the hull shape of NZL84, Alinghi and Oracle's jumper-less rigs and Alinghi's black mainsail.

The jumper-less rig reduces drag while the black mainsail is believed to be constructed a little differently to get the sail to hold its shape better.

"We understand the black mainsail, there is a potential weight gain," Dalton said.

"It is still built on a mould but it is a lot of patches of a particular type of filament which, when you add them up, gives you a weight gain.

"The mainsails they have used have had structural issues but they will solve that. Is it an advantage? Possibly. We discounted jumper-less rigs a while ago."

Dalton said one of the dangers syndicates faced was "the science experiment taking over the campaign. The hardest thing is saying no".

While getting NZL92 up to speed is the immediate focus, Dalton said they could not afford to let their crew-work slip. They have hired more sailors - including Brad Jackson from ABN Amro One - so they have two full crews to ensure "ding-dong battles" on the Gulf.

Dalton is confident backup helmsman Ben Ainslie will push skipper Dean Barker.

He said while Barker was away at a TP52 regatta in August, Ainslie "cleaned up" Luna Rossa - who had changed the bow on their new boat. "Ben is right there," he said. But he will never replace Barker at the helm.

Team NZ will have some company in the Gulf with Chris Dickson's Oracle here from mid-November.

Dalton said they would like to train against Oracle but were not sure if the timing was going to work.

"My understanding is they won't be up and running until early December and their main focus is their new boat which they will fly out in January. By then we are gone."

Alinghi are also escaping the northern winter and heading to Dubai.

"I think with those two teams [Alinghi and Oracle], they have seen a steady rate of improvement in Team NZ from the ashes of 2003 and, one of the things you can put that down to, is the fact that we run between the hemispheres."