Editor’s note: This story is part of The Athletic’s coverage of SailGP, an international sailing competition that has been likened to Formula 1 on water. Follow SailGP here.Even when the wacky Halifax weather hurls the wildest of curveballs at the SailGP fleet, somehow Tom Slingsby and the irrepressible Australians ride their magic carpet of consummate skill and a decent dose of luck to lead the standings after the first day of the Canada Sail Grand Prix.This weekend’s event in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is the first time in SailGP’s six-year history the fleet has been split into two groups from the get-go. Where the group of 13 F50 catamarans would usually launch off the line in a mass start, Saturday saw Group A compete with seven teams, followed by Group B with six teams.There had been a day of split-fleet racing on the Sunday of the New Zealand Sail Grand Prix in February, as a response to the horrendous crash in Auckland between the New Zealand and the French F50s. The idea is that splitting the fleet will reduce the traffic on the race course and reduce the chance of a nasty pileup.But there has never been a whole weekend of split-fleet racing. SailGP’s movement in this direction has been reluctant. It’s logistically messy, and start lines of six or seven boats are not as spectacular as a full fleet of 13 jostling for position on a crowded line. But the three-way crash in New York is still fresh in the memory. So, with a tight race course set between the Halifax city waterfront and Dartmouth shoreline, and a forecast of gusts up to 20 knots, it was a reasonable call by the race committee to think “safety first” and opt for split fleets.The 20-knot gusts never materialized, however, and very little wind showed up at all for the 90-minute broadcast window. With the benefit of hindsight, this is not the weekend SailGP would have chosen to begin the split-fleet experiment. Danish skipper Nicolai Sehested made no secret of his dislike for this move to separate groups.