At the end of February the Auld Mug, the America's Cup trophy left Geneva, its temporary home for the past four years, on the ‘Road to Valencia'. This was a procession through five major European cities, which during March took the Cup to Paris, Rome, Berlin and Madrid, before reaching Port America's Cup in Valencia.

In pursuit of this Cup, 12 teams have spent more than 700 million Euros over the past three years. So no wonder they get twitchy when they suspect each other of espionage. There have been a few such instances reported in recent weeks as pre-competition nerves build to bursting point. For some, the spying and intrigue all add to the allure of the Cup, and certainly it has long played a part in the game. So with the stakes so high in 2007, it should come as no surprise that there are signs of it happening again.

The only team that has been named and shamed is Areva Challenge, who were accused by the Italian team Luna Rossa of taking photos of ITA-94 while it was far out to sea engaged in private testing and training. When a boat from America's Cup Management started to follow Luna Rossa, with an independent French photographer taking photos for a French newspaper, the Italians sent over a support boat to see off the unwanted guests.

Now there is nothing in the rules to stop a boat - even from ACM - circling round a Cup boat while training, but what happened next was where the problems began. The French photographer returned to shore and passed four of his Luna Rossa photos to members of Areva Challenge. One of these images was alleged to reveal design details on the new Italian boat that would not normally have been visible to a rival team. This put Areva in breach of the America's Cup Protocol, which prohibits competitors from receiving information via a third party that would be illegal for them to obtain directly.

Luna Rossa took their complaint to the America's Cup Jury who considered the evidence. Areva claimed to have deleted three of the images and then retained a low resolution version of the fourth. This photo was retained for a time by Areva and distributed to key people within the French team. Areva admitted that this was a "gross error of judgment". However in its defence, Areva had operated in a frank and open manner once it was discovered that the breach had occurred, and Areva had acted promptly to mitigate the error once it was aware that it was in breach of the Protocol. The French team made an apology to Luna Rossa which the Italians duly accepted.

The decision of the Jury was that Areva Challenge had committed a serious breach of the Protocol, and deducted two sail credits (meaning they can only use 43 new sails in the Louis Vuitton Cup instead of the maximum 45 allowed). In addition Areva were charged costs of 21,000 Euros.

Another Italian team, Mascalzone Latino-Capitalia Team, has voiced its concerns about a helicopter that was supposedly filming only "to get images of the coast and the port's infrastructures", but which spent some time hovering above the team's two boats despite the fact that they were training some 12 miles offshore. All very intriguing - but in the end probably meaningless. Does anyone really have a secret weapon ready to be unveiled at the commencement of hostilities this April? Emirates Team New Zealand don't seem to think so, and remember it was the Kiwis that had everyone guessing with their breakthrough double-bottomed ‘hula' boats four years ago.

Grant Dalton has always been very keen to distance himself from the whole debacle of March 2003 when the Kiwis were handed their 5-0 humiliation by Alinghi. Ever since taking over management of the team three years ago the former round-the-world-race winner has been keen to make this a sailor-focused campaign, with the designers asked to give the sailors what they want to sail, as opposed to the designers handing the sailing team a boat that they think they ought to sail, and telling them to get on with it. The perception of their boats, NZL-84 and NZL-92, is that they are evolutionary as opposed to the more revolutionary experiments tried by BMW ORACLE's radical USA-87.

Dalton sees things in simple terms, which perhaps is a good thing in a game where it is easy to forget that is just a boat race, albeit a very hi-tech, high-stakes boat race. The gruff Kiwi told the New Zealand Herald recently: "We want to start racing again. We've done a lot of testing and I think last year we found that we were testing and not racing, and along came the Louis Vuitton Acts and we weren't ready. We were happy with our pace but not going around the corners too well.

"We're moving into a racing mode now. Testing is done. We want to go out-of-house racing against BMW ORACLE Racing, Luna Rossa, whomever we can line up with. We're not scared to go racing against anyone, we're not in a mind-set that it's bad for us to show what we have. It's naïve to think you're good enough for that. We want to learn from other people." That's a radical departure from the more customary ‘secret squirrel' approach to Cup preparations, so is Dalton being naïve in wanting to lay his cards on the table so early? I would say not. After all, Alinghi was by far the fastest boat in 2005 with the remodelled SUI-75 and yet come the following year, the new boats from the top Challengers seemed only as good as - not significantly better than - Alinghi's old boat. Witnessing a boat going quickly is one thing, but understanding why and incorporating that into your own design and testing programme is another.

The other thought that might have occurred to Dalton is that unless there is some early cooperation and collaboration between the Challengers, then none of them is going to be good enough to match the might of Alinghi for the America's Cup Match at the end of June. Whatever Dalton's reasons, the Louis Vuitton Acts of the past two and a half years have certainly promoted a much friendlier and more open form of rivalry than the cold war that used to exist in Auckland and in previous Cup campaigns before that.

The entente cordiale was in evidence at the Gandia Games, an informal day's competition between Shosholoza and Areva Challenge. Both teams and their families drove 45 minutes south of Valencia to the French team's former base in Gandia for some fun match racing in small keelboats, with a number of contests that included shore crew v shore crew, afterguard v afterguard and even marketing department v marketing department. After a lunch of paella, there was some beach volleyball, a rowing contest and a boules competition. So it's good to see that despite all the skulduggery and espionage, proven or otherwise, the teams are managing to keep some perspective on life in the pressured bubble of the America's Cup.