Michael Dunkley, the Premier, and Grant Gibbons, the Minister of Economic Development responsible for the 35th America’s Cup, are among a Bermuda contingent attending the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series in Portsmouth, England.

The group, that also comprises Peter Durhager, the ACBDA chairman, and Mike Winfield, the ACBDA CEO, has travelled to the South Coast of England to get a sense of how to run a sporting event of this magnitude and also to promote October’s World Series event in Bermuda.

“We are here, not only to promote Bermuda from a marketing perspective, but also to get a sense of how the logistics work with these World Series events,” Dr Gibbons said. “It’s going to be very useful from that perspective as well. Portsmouth has done a very nice job here in terms of the layout.

“The nice thing is that we have seen a lot of Bermuda presence here from the Bermuda Tourism Authority, Gosling’s, as well as some of the other Bermuda members, which is very encouraging. Bermuda will get a lot of visibility as a consequence of this World Series.

“The contrast between the very dark blue water of the Solent and when you see Bermuda up on the screen with the turquoise waters, it looks very inviting indeed and hopefully a lot of people will feel that way.”

Mr Winfield added: “There are all sorts of things we are seeing here and it’s interesting how many, for instance, Portaloos [portable toilets] they have over here. There are probably more Portaloos in Portsmouth than there are in Bermuda.

“We are learning a lot and our technical guys are over at the technical side working with the teams and getting information from them. We have gone from the theoretical up till now to the real thing happening here, so it’s good for us and we are learning.”

The official opening ceremony of the America’s Cup World Series took place on Thursday evening at the Southsea Common.

The series was officially declared open after five-year old Portsmouth School student Lee Howard cut the ceremonial ribbon — albeit with a little help from Sir Ben Ainslie, the principal and skipper of Land Rover BAR, the British challenger.

“I thought obviously a lot about Portsmouth and Ben Ainslie, and you would expect that,” Dr Gibbons said. “This is the first stop on the World Series and Sir Ben is clearly a British favourite. He got a lot of prominence last night, as you would expect.”