Team Seacats

While I had hoped to be able to announce yesterday that a date has been set for the America’s Cup match on monster 90 foot multi-hulls, it didn’t happen. Alinghi/SNG claims that OracleGGYC came to the table with no willingness to budge on the date – Oracle isn’t saying much at all other than they don’t “wish to disclose details of the discussion at this stage.” Alinghi filed for a hearing again with Justice Cahn for a ruling – obviously hoping to move the date due to the delays caused by the court hearings. GGYC pleaded the court for a quick hearing. Cahn delivers and, this afternoon, granted the hearing date for next week to hear arguments (but as in the past, there’s no guarantee for the delivery of a ruling).

Here’s the bit of the Deed of Gift language in dispute;

…The Challenging Club shall give ten months’ notice, in writing, naming the days for the proposed races; but no race shall be sailed in the days intervening between November 1st and May 1st…

It certainly doesn’t say what to do in the event the match is contested in court but it clearly says “The Challenging Club shall give ten month’s notice…”. GGYC did give ten months (actually 12 months) notice with their challenge. GGYC first filed motion that SNG has accepted an invalid challenge and that theirs should be the valid one. That was ruled on by Cahn making GGYC the official challenger based on their challenge. SNG then filed back to the courts disputing the validity of the same challenge because it included the phrase “keel yacht”. The Court dismissed this claim and again pronounced the GGYC challenge as the official one. The only official challenge is the challenge filed by GGYC in October….and it had the minimum 10 month challenge in it. I really don’t see how Alinghi is going to get out of this…even more so than the last motion they filed with the court.

The request for hearing to Justice Cahn issued by SNG/Alinghi’s legal team REALLY struck me as arrogant and bound to fail. In it, they dispute every ruling the Cahn has previously made in this case but then plead for more time to prepare for the match. They also hollowly claim that the Deed of Gift “Requires the Defender be Allowed No Less than 10 Months to Prepare for the Match”…read the verbiage from the actual deed in the above quote again and see if you agree with me that that is not even close to the the context provided in the wording of the Deed. Read Alinghi’s letter for yourself and decide. Hopefully this shouldn’t take long to hear from Cahn this time.