The Auld Mug

Yes, NZ has won the Americas cup again in a thrilling final against Luna Rosa From Italy.
Amazing boats flying at 4 times the wind speed, at one point the NZ boat was going at 50 knots.
For the final race yesterday, hundreds of boats from super yachts, gin palaces, all the way down to surf skis were anchored around the race track perimeters, with thousands of people at the cup village watching on giant screens. Because there were so many boats out there, the harbour master made a compulsory maximum speed of 5 knots for all spectator vessels for the day.
A small glitch at the start of the finals series first to 7 wins in 13 races Auckland was in level 2 lockdown for 3 days while waiting for covid test results from contacts of one positive case linked to a known cluster. This put restrictions on the number of people allowed to gather and in bars and restaurants which took the gloss off the first 2 finals days.
Overall the series suffered from a lack of wind, with a number of races abandoned.
Great tv viewing with all the graphics, including wind shadows from the leading boats sails.
Huge money involved, but the technology and innovation in marine engineering bolsters our large boat building industry, and for a country of 5 million people we do not do too badly in world sport.

impressive wind driven speeds - I do like an engine though!

Thats the trouble with sail boats , when it is calm enough to go fishing you cannot get there and when it is good for sailing too rough to fish

I have memories of being locked down in Greymouth some 20+ years ago when a cyclone was running through. There were 5 TV channels to watch in the hotel on the Saturday afternoon. Four of them were showing rugby. Not internationals but local teams. The fifth channel was experimenting because they thought not all of the ladies wanted to watch rugby. They were experimenting with showing netball! Kids could not help but get inspired in sport if it was all there was to watch. Play for a local team and you might get on TV!

Is Saturday viewing still the same in NZ now?

Rhod Lloyd wrote:

Thats the trouble with sail boats , when it is calm enough to go fishing you cannot get there and when it is good for sailing too rough to fish

Ha Ha so true.

Sorry musselman, I intended to reply but forgot. We only have Freeview here, but only 7 or so channels we use, some of the others are "plus 1'.
We have a freeview recorder which can sometimes record 2 channels and watch another at the same time, so mostly we record and watch later.
Much of what is served is "reality" or game shows and of little interest to us oldies. Of all the channels we watch probably Choice suits us most after watching the TV 1 news which is not the best but at least local. Most sport is now on sky or spark sport, both of which are subscription. I have sometimes watched sky when traveling and while there are no adverts the self promotion takes up the same amount of time.
We do quite well here with fishing and hunting shows, with the occasional English fishing or nature programm, one I remember from a long time ago was Bernard Cribbins and a friend having a "friendly" gudgeon match on a pond.

https://freeviewnz.tv/tvguide/whats-on

If you really want to see what is on all week, the above tells all