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Photo courtesy of SailGP Race officials Mel Roberts and Ian Murray (left to right, wearing white hats), top to bottom, regatta service staff Josh Anthony, Tre Maxwell, Al – Posing with Mr. Green.
CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — A young man who was born and raised in Escanaba and spent his summers sailing on Lake Michigan is now traveling the world in regatta service for the International Hydrofoil Catamaran Race. The 2023-2024 season will run from June to June, as the event will be held in different host cities in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Using SailGP, Joshua Anthony has worked in eight countries in the space of a few months.
He is currently some 13,700 miles away helping organize the Sail Grand Prix in New Zealand.
Josh, 24, attended Holy Name and graduated from Escanaba High School in 2017. He was often near the harbor when there was open water.
“He’s been sailing since he was 5 years old,” said his mother, Cindy Anthony, adding that the only reason he didn’t start sooner was because his mother wouldn’t allow it.
“I grew up sailing with my family and I’ve been taught by my father all my life. His father was a sailor,” Josh told reporters from a hotel in Christchurch, on the other side of the world, 17 hours time difference. He told the group. “He’s always had an affinity for sailing. Over the past few summers, we always tried to take him on at least a weeklong sailing trip.”
He has become familiar with the waters of northern Lake Michigan and has explored further afield in recent years.
Through connections with other community members with similar passions, Josh has traveled to Newport, Rhode Island on Bob Inn’s J/80, and traveled to Georgia aboard Steve Harris’ Lightning. He said he was lucky enough to travel to the savannah. Ying and Harris are both members of the Escanaba Yacht Club.
In 2022, Josh applied for an internship with Sail GP. Sail GP is a high-tech global racing league with teams from 10 countries that aims to be “the world’s most sustainable and purpose-driven sports and entertainment platform.”
“I’ve always had a dream of working in the sailing industry, but there aren’t many opportunities in the Midwest. I saw the ad online and it was a chance to get involved so I did,” said Josh .
Initially, the position was to work on one event in particular: the United Sail Grand Prix I Chicago at Navy Pier. Josh secured the role with the regatta service, kept in touch, and was called back to one of the final races of that season in San Francisco. This year, his fourth with SailGP, he was offered a permanent role, taking him to all parts of the fleet.
Each team will consist of five crew members, with teams from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, the United States and Germany competing in F50 catamarans. Each boat has two sails (a jib and a modular wing sail) to utilize the wind as propulsion. Hydrofoil technology reduces drag by lifting the twin fuselage above the water at high speeds, allowing it to reach speeds of about 90 miles per hour as it flies over water on stanchions. An electric motor and lithium-ion battery hydraulically power certain mechanisms, such as jib seat trimming and daggerboard depth. Continuous development takes place throughout the design class.
Not only are the boats themselves state-of-the-art, but so is the way they capture race footage and data. Metrics are streamed to all teams, which not only helps the team’s strategists and causes close games, but also allows the public to see all the numbers.
“The F50 is basically a mobile data center,” Warren Jones, SailGP’s chief technology officer, said in a video released by Oracle, a cloud computing service partnered with SailGP. “On the F50 he has 30,000 data points. Anyone with an internet connection and a browser can access this information and see what’s happening on the F50 in real time.”
That information includes each boat’s speed, heading, ride height, pitch angle, roll angle, hydrofoil rake angle, wing sail camber, and more.
But for some people, graphs of performance data aren’t as interesting as watching the actual race. The race will be televised and made engaging and easy to understand using digital overlays tailored in our London studio with the help of our local team.
Josh is one of a five-person regatta services team that arrives seven days before the event to begin preparations. As the week progresses they will cover more about telemetry systems and race management.
In preparation for this weekend’s race, Josh arrived in Christchurch on Friday the 15th and began work at Lyttelton Harbor on the 16th. His team’s first task was to unpack two shipping containers and equip and prepare five team tracking boats with his new third set of radios and the necessary wires and antennas.
The setup for these events is done in stages, with multiple staff working in their areas of expertise. The race yacht itself arrives in a container and must be assembled.
“The wing team is responsible for the wings of all yachts. The foil team is constantly maintaining and polishing, waxing, repairing and repairing the foils, rudders and several other items,” Josh explained. “And the electronics team does all the electronic work for the main systems of the racing yacht, controls, foils, rudders, wings, etc.”
The communications team has been contracted to Germany’s Rydell, which also performs similar work in F1.
Josh said it was time to move on to the next phase of race preparation. “Then we switch gears and get into the broadcast side, and on Thursday we’ll be rigging up the TV boat and two helicopters.”
Another side job that Josh does in other yacht races is controlling GPS-driven buoys for MarkSetBot. That gig is separate from his SailGP, but the skills translate.
“During the (SailGP) race, I basically use the same software to control nine autonomous race marks,” Josh said. “Then you can control and move the race marks in response to course changes, etc.”
The Regatta service also tracks production-critical information for the London studio.
“Our team is responsible for helping our live broadcast graphic overlays run smoothly and crisply,” says Josh. “Our system has a small tracking system built into all of our assets, including race marks, tracked boats, TV boats… So we go back to London and put a yellow circle around the race marks at the anchor point. We have prepared a broadcast.”
The first day of racing in New Zealand will include three fleet races starting from 3pm (NZDT) on Saturday 23 March to 10pm (ET) on Friday night. The second day’s race will be held at the same time the next day. Live and past streams can be viewed on the SailGP app, YouTube and Facebook.
Television broadcasts are delayed in the United States. CBS Sports Network will air it all on Sunday afternoon local time. This weekend, viewers can find his 2021 show, “SailGP: Racing on the Edge,” discussing the league’s stories at noon. The first day of racing in New Zealand will be broadcast from 1pm, with the second day at 2.30pm.
Next week, Josh will return to his home in Escanaba after a six-week vacation. Just before Christchurch, there was a two-week stint in New Zealand and Australia, following the season’s eighth race in Sydney.
Events earlier in the season brought the fleet and crew to Chicago. Los Angeles; Saint-Tropez, France. Taranto, Italy. Andalusia Cadiz, Spain. Dubai, United Arab Emirates. and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. In the next few months, they plan to go to Bermuda. Halifax, Canada. New York and San Francisco.
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