It’s been nearly 18 months since Oracle Team USA made Bermuda its home for the next America’s Cup.

Since that time most of our team has moved to the island and we’ve added several Bermudians to our squad.

Our families are here, our kids are in school, we’re in the community and have been soaking up the Bermuda experience — raft up parties, Cup Match, Harbour Nights, Non-Mariners Day and the End to End are just a few of them. Many of us have also been through a couple of hurricane parties now, so we feel like real locals!

Importantly, Bermuda has done a tremendous job of making us feel welcome. It’s an easy place to come to love and already we’ve made some lifelong friends and all the kids love their respective schools and teachers.

As a team our focus is on winning the America’s Cup next year so that we have the option of staying in Bermuda! The defending champion decides the venue so being successful next year is critical to keeping that option open.

But it won’t be easy. I think this America’s Cup is going to be the hardest to win — and I say that having needed to win the last eight races for a 9-8 comeback win in the last cup.

But the difference this time is in the depth of the opposition and the challenge of racing these boats.

Every single challenger has proven itself strong and capable of winning races on any given day. We’ve seen that in the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series events where wins have been spread across three of the challengers and where every single team has won individual races.

Looking to the competition next year, the new America’s Cup Class boats we have to design and build are the most advanced, extreme boats we’re ever raced in the cup. Our design, engineering and shore team have been doing long hours as we start locking in critical design decisions.

And the physical demands on the crew are staggering. Everything on the boat needs to be powered by the athletes, who grind handles to charge the hydraulic system on board. We call it ‘moving oil’.

If there isn’t enough pressure in the system, you can’t adjust the foils, move the wing, or turn the boat. You need to move oil to move the boat. The more you can make adjustments, the faster you will go. Run out of power and there will be big consequences.

So the fitness challenge for our sailors — and we call them athletes for this very reason — is huge. Here again, Bermuda has proven to be a dream venue. In addition to our morning gym sessions, our trainers have us out swimming and running the beach, and up the rocks, at Horseshoe Bay, at the pool in the National Sports Centre and we’ve been fortunate enough to train with a few of Bermuda’s best boxers; Corey Boyce and Nikki Bascome being a personal highlight.

As a result, we think we can count our team fitness as a competitive advantage heading into next year.

When I think about next year, I get excited looking ahead to the events in May and June.

We’ve been in a lucky position from our base at Dockyard to see the America’s Cup event village location at Cross Island develop. If you haven’t been to Dockyard in a while you should come and take a look, because I think Bermudians are going to be surprised at the scale of what happens in May and June next year.

It’s not just the America’s Cup racing. There are the Superyachts, 50 of the biggest boats in the world, who will be here to watch the racing; the old J Class America’s Cup boats — up to nine of them — will be racing in June as well; then there is all of the activity in the event village including live concerts and parties in the evenings.

Plus there are also two more events that I believe in strongly — the Red Bull Youth America’s Cup, with Team Bermuda, and the AC Endeavour racing. Both of these events are fully integrated into the America’s Cup Programme. Seeing the next generation get a start on the biggest stage in the world is going to be incredible.

Without question the highlight of my time in Bermuda to date has been presenting a few special young kids with their very own brand new Optimist boat courtesy of the Oracle boat builders and the AC Endeavour Programme. Man you should have seen their faces!

I know we have a lot of work to do between now and next May to prepare, but it’s going to be worth it. Lining up for that first race in front of thousands of boats and tens of thousands of fans gives us plenty of motivation.

We’ll have more regular updates like this in the future, but for now, on behalf of all of my team-mates at Oracle, I’d like to offer a big thank you to Bermuda and we look forward to seeing you out on the Great Sound.