Courtesy photo SailGP race officials Mel Roberts and Ian Murray (in the white hats from left to right) pose with, from top to bottom, regatta services staff Josh Anthony, Tré Maxwell and Al Green.

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — A young man who was born and raised in Escanaba and spent his summers sailing on Lake Michigan has been traveling the globe working regatta services for international hydrofoil catamaran races. As events are held in different host cities in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the 2023 to 2024 season is from June to June. With SailGP, Joshua Anthony has worked in eight countries in as many months.

Right now, he’s about 8,700 miles away helping run the Sail Grand Prix in New Zealand.

Josh, age 24, graduated from Escanaba High School in 2017 after attending Holy Name. When there was open water, he was often near a harbor.

“He’s been sailing since he was five,” said his mother, Cindy Anthony, adding that the only reason he didn’t start sooner is because she didn’t allow it.

“I grew up sailing with my family — been taught with my father all my life. His father was a sailor,” said Josh, speaking with the Press from a hotel in Christchurch, on the opposite side of the globe with a 17-hour time difference. “Just always had an affinity for sailing. We always tried to do at least a week-long sailing trip for the past several summers.”

He became more than familiar with the waters of northern Lake Michigan and in recent years explored farther.

Through connecting with other community members with similar passions, Josh said that he’s been fortunate enough to travel to Newport, R.I. to crew on Bob Yin’s J/80 and to Savannah, Ga. with Steve Harris on his Lightning. Both Yin and Harris are members of the Escanaba Yacht Club.

In 2022, Josh applied for an internship with Sail GP, a high-tech global racing league with 10 national teams 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, and there aren’t many opportunities in the Midwest. I saw the ad for it online, and it was just a chance to get in, and so I took it,” said Josh.

That position, initially, was specifically to work one event — the United States Sail Grand Prix I Chicago at Navy Pier. Josh secured the role with regatta services, kept in touch, and was called back again to work one of the last races of that season in San Francisco. This year — SailGP’s fourth — he was offered a permanent role and now goes everywhere the fleet does.

Each with a crew of five, teams for Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, the United States and Germany race on F50 catamarans. Each boat has two sails — a jib and a modular wingsail — to harness the wind for propulsion. Hydrofoil technology lifts the twin hulls above the surface of the water when at speed, reducing drag and allowing the crafts to reach speeds around 60 mph as they fly over the water on struts. Electric motors and lithium-ion batteries hydraulically power certain mechanisms, like the trimming of the jib sheet and depth of the daggerboards. Continual developments are made across the design class.

Not only are the boats themselves cutting-edge, so too are the methods used to capture footage and data on the races. Metrics are streamed to all teams, which helps their strategists and makes for close competition — but the public can see all those numbers, too.

“The F50 is basically a mobile data center,” said SailGP Chief Technology Officer Warren Jones in a video released by Oracle, the cloud computing service partnered with SailGP. “We have 30,000 data points on an F50 … anybody with an internet connection and a browser (can) go in and have a look at this information and view what’s going on on an F50 in real time.”

That info includes each boat’s speed, heading, ride height, pitch angle, roll angle, hydrofoil rake angle, wingsail camber and more.

But a chart of performance data isn’t as intriguing to some as watching the actual races, which are televised and made engaging and easily-understandable by the use of digital overlays coordinated in a studio in London with the aid of teams on-site.

Josh is one of a five-person regatta services team that arrives to start setting things up seven days before the event begins. As the week goes on, they deal more with telemetry systems and race management.

For this weekend’s race, Josh arrived in Christchurch on Friday the 15th, with work beginning in Lyttelton Harbor on the 16th. His team’s first task was to unpack two shipping containers and prepare the five team chase boats by equipping them with a new, third set of radios and the necessary wires and antennae.

Setup at these events is done in phases, with multiple crews working in their respective, specialized areas. The race yachts themselves arrive in containers and need to be assembled.

“Wing team takes care of the wings for all the yachts. Foil teams, they’re constantly maintaining and polishing, waxing, fixing, repairing all the foils, rudders and a couple other items,” Josh explained. “And then the electronics team, they’re doing all the electronic work on the race yachts, the controls, the main systems for the foils, rudders, wings and so forth.”

A communications team is contracted out with German company Reidel, who also does similar work for Formula 1.

When it’s time to move to the next phase of race prep, said Josh, “then we kind of switch hats and go into the broadcast side of things, where on Thursday we rig the TV boats as well as the two helicopters.”

Another side job Josh does for other sailboat races is controlling GPS-powered buoys for MarkSetBot. That gig is separate from SailGP, but the skills translate.

“During (SailGP) racing, I am in control of nine autonomous race marks using the same software, essentially,” Josh said. “And I can control and move the race marks depending on course changes and so forth.”

Regatta services also tracks information that is essential for the London studio’s production.

“Our team is in charge of helping make sure that the graphic overlays for the live broadcast is running smoothly and clear,” Josh said. “Our system has, like, little tracker systems on all the assets, including the race marks, the chase boats, the TV boats… so then back in London, they have an anchor point to put the yellow circle around the race marks for the broadcast.”

The first day of racing in New Zealand includes three fleet races beginning Saturday, March 23 at 3 p.m. NZDT, which was 10 p.m. Friday night EDT. Day two races take place the same time on the following day. Live and past streams may be viewed on the SailGP app, YouTube, and Facebook.

In the U.S., the televised broadcasts are delayed; CBS Sports Network airs everything on Sunday afternoon, local time. This weekend, viewers can find a program from 2021 called “SailGP: Racing on the Edge” discussing the story of the league at noon. New Zealand’s day one races will be shown at 1 p.m., and day two airs at 2:30 p.m.

Next week, Josh will return home to Escanaba after six weeks away. Immediately before Christchurch, he had two weeks to kill in New Zealand and Australia after the season’s eighth event, which was held in Sydney.

Events earlier in the season brought the fleet and crews to Chicago; Los Angeles; Saint-Tropez, France; Taranto, Italy; Andalucía-Cádiz, Spain; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Abu Dhabi, UAE. In coming months, they will go to Bermuda; Halifax, Canada; New York and San Francisco.