The latest — and thankfully final — stage in what has been called “The Billionaire Boat Battle” was heard in the New York Court of Appeals on Tuesday, when Larry Ellison’s BMW Oracle team launched a final legal bid to have them recognised as the official America’s Cup challengers to Ernesto Bertarelli’s Alinghi, the holders.

It has been a drawn-out saga and for those of us in the teams hoping to enter the next America’s Cup it has been a frustrating time. The court’s decision will not be revealed for another month and until then we will not know whether the America’s Cup will be an 18-team elimination series or a one-on-one duel between Alinghi and Oracle.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, ten of the would-be competitors have been taking part in the Louis Vuitton Pacific Series, a regatta in Auckland. Surprisingly, there has been little talk of the court battle. Everyone has been wrapped up in the racing and, after all, there is really nothing anyone can do about it.

The results in Auckland will not affect who takes part in the America’s Cup, but it gives everyone an important benchmark. Although Team Origin, the British entry that I skipper, lost yesterday in the quarter-finals, we are fairly happy with our progress. The team have huge potential for the future.

The first stage of the regatta, a round-robin series, went better than we expected. We won all four races and while there were some issues with our boat-handling that needed addressing, we collected some pretty big scalps, including a 36-second win over Alinghi. The Swiss look as polished as ever, even though we are all in borrowed boats for this regatta. Their boat-handling is pretty faultless, so it was great to beat them.

By coming top in that pool, we advanced to the “Gold Fleet”, a second round-robin stage for the top six boats. It brought me head to head with Emirates Team New Zealand, for whom I competed in the last America’s Cup, in 2007. They weren’t quite as friendly towards me as they used to be, but perhaps that’s because Team Origin beat them by seven seconds.

If that was a good win, we had been crippled by bad luck in our previous race against Oracle. With Sir Keith Mills, our backer, on board as the eighteenth — non-competing — man, we made a good start and forced Oracle into an early penalty. But a very minor collision at the start had damaged our headfoil and we found we were unable to hoist our jib. We were forced to withdraw and then, to make matters worse, were hit with a half-point deduction because of the accident, even though we felt Oracle had been at fault. We appealed against it, without success.

Having also lost our rematch against Alinghi by 15 seconds, it meant that we had to enter a play-off to reach the quarter-finals. That must-win race, against Pataguas by K-Challenge, of France, was a scrappy match — as contests between British and French sailors often are — but we had a good aggressive plan and managed to hold them off when it looked as if they would sail over the top of us and take our wind.

Our ultimately comfortable win put Team Origin into yesterday’s quarter-final against Damiani Italia, but sadly that was the end of the road. We trailed at the start and although the race was neck and neck all the way round, we could not quite pull in front. Damiani then lost to Oracle, who now face Alinghi for the right to race Team New Zealand in the best-of-seven final this weekend.

There has been controversy about that. Team New Zealand won as many round-robin races as we did, but they got a bye to the final because they are the hosts. It is ironic that they fiddled it so they would progress, given their strong opposition to Alinghi’s suggested rules for the next America’s Cup, which were seen as biased towards the Swiss, but we just have to laugh about it.

After all, this is New Zealand’s regatta on home water and probably the only way to get funding from sponsors was to ensure that the home boat did well. Anyway, the most important thing is that we are competing with each other on the water again.