www.SPINNAKERWEB.net - Irelands Premier Sailing Website - First with news, reviews, forums and surveys from the Irish sailing scene. - GREEN TEAM’S VOLVO OPEN 70 ON ITS WAY TO EUROPE

The Green Team (Ireland’s entry in the Volvo Ocean Race 2008-2009) celebrated the completion of their new Volvo Open 70 with a “Thank You China Event” at McConaghy Boats in Zhuhai China, today Saturday 03 May 2008. Construction started in October and has been completed on schedule, with the boat due to leave on a ship bound for the UK on 08 May.

Green Team’s New Volvo Open 70 build completed in China·
Green Team prepare to ship Volvo Open 70 to Europe·

The boat will be sea trialled in the UK before moving to its training camp in Galway in early July The boat has been constructed in a facility located approximately 60 miles north of Hong Kong.

The mainly Australian led team at McConaghy’s has been working alongside American designers Reichel Pugh and structural engineers Applied Structural Analysis Ltd (ASTA) from the UK, as well as a 90 strong Chinese build team.

A total of 40,000 man hours have gone into the completion of this boat, At today’s event, Ian Walker Green Team skipper commented “This boat has been seven months in the making and we’ve had a fantastic team working on this project. I would like to thank everybody in the project, but especially those involved in the hard graft here in China. I am confident that we have a great boat and will have a competitive entry into the race. I cannot wait to get her back to Europe and out on the water to start preparing for the adventure ahead of us all.”

With the build now complete the team will prepare the boat to be shipped back to Europe, with an anticipated arrival in the UK for the start of June. Once in the UK the boat will be assembled and tested for two weeks before heading to the team’s homeport of Galway in Ireland, which will be the team’s base before leaving for Alicante in September.

Galway is one of the eleven stopover ports during the 37,000 nautical mile Volvo Ocean Race which starts in Alicante this coming October. Galway’s positioning allows for excellent training facilities for the team, with the testing conditions of the North Atlantic on their doorstep. The Volvo Ocean Race 2008-2009 will start from Alicante in October this year and will visit Capetown, Kochi, Singapore, Qingdao, Rio de Janeiro and Boston before arriving in Galway on 23 May 2009.

Failte Ireland on behalf of the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism are the principal sponsors of the Galway stopover and supported the bid for the Volvo Ocean Race to come to Galway. The stopover is expected to be the biggest sporting event in Ireland since the Ryder Cup. Up to 140,000 visitors are expected to visit the city and surrounding areas and pumping an estimated €43m into the area in spending as a result. After Galway the race will continue to Gothenburg and Stockholm before finishing in St Petersburg at the end of June 2009.