The Cup That Ran Amok
Seitz, Russell
Russell Seitz THE CUP THAT RAN AMOK New York State Supreme Court Justice Ciparek's recent ruling that awarded the America's Cup to the loser from New Zealand not only violated the spirit of the...
...True, she can hold her own against a Class A tall ship, but today multihulls run the Atlantic in under a week...
...In defiance of immemorial custom, someone had neglected to place a coin for luck on the mast-step...
...Marine architects of talent queued for computer time as both Conner and his rivals in San Francisco bid for the most powerful software money could buy...
...Back in the flat expanse of the harbor's waters, it was easy to see why...
...Three levels of judicial review and appeal remain before the Cup is exiled to Kiwiland, and the Stars and Stripes syndicate is not without counsel...
...And those of us who sail them will be seeing less of you, ever more briefly, and ever further and further astern...
...Russell Seitz THE CUP THAT RAN AMOK New York State Supreme Court Justice Ciparek's recent ruling that awarded the America's Cup to the loser from New Zealand not only violated the spirit of the yachting competition but ignored the leading role technology has always played in the event...
...Stars and Stripes is to cruising as downhill racing is to a cross-country treadmill...
...Ashore, no one had mentioned the necessity of learning, in ten minutes or less, the gentle art of diving for dear life under the wheeling wing's low-slung undercarriage while trying to gauge trajectories and miss landing on hardware rather than netting when feet and trampoline parted company...
...But Sopwith was unflappable...
...On the first such occasion, the challenger and defender were of identical waterline length and only one ton apart...
...Further Articles: Article 1.3 shall be the only further and the final article...
...They were right, and returned from Cowes bearing not the $10,000 or so they'd hoped to win by wagering on the races, but a truly awful piece of Victorian silverware...
...As we cleared the point and the breeze picked up to eight or nine knots, the digital knotmeter started its ascent into the low teens...
...But within the rules' constraints, the challengers continued to lose not just every match, but almost every race...
...Rules and Restrictions on Design, Materials, Construction and Instruments of Navigation: There shall be none...
...Ever hear the expression "sandbagged...
...Some 130 years before the fact, a syndicate operating out of a fledgling yacht club situated in the Elysian Fields (a.k.a...
...In the twenty-three consecutive defenses of their trophy that followed, the New York Yacht Club had to take on challengers of all shapes and sizes...
...The numbers flashed by as we went onto a reach and the wingmast started to develop its first few thousand pounds of lift...
...Computers, however, using finite element modeling, can go beyond what marine architects traditionally do...
...1:1 We were sailing twice as fast as the wind, which, at the margin, is not a bad way to sail...
...He returned to England and in three years was back with a manifestly faster J-boat, Endeavor H. New York countered with Ranger...
...What can you do when ripping alongside something twice your size at thirteen knots...
...and Livonia (280 tons/18,153 sq...
...I hear Royale, a 75-footer, is up for grabs...
...Article 1.1...
...As enough lawyers to reassemble the Bell System sparred in Albany, the justice called time out...
...The J-class international rule, like that governing today's 12-meters, was developmental...
...The races were on, and Australia III sailed through a loophole in the 12-meter rule and into history...
...Still, designer Bert Rutan had done well, enclosing ten times the volume of one of Voyager's honest-togosh wings, the whole rig weighed barely half a ton...
...My own views on this dispute have been a matter of record since the New York Times published them a year ago...
...In flagrant violation of one of yacht racing's oldest rules, another two dozen crew were far out on her broadly flared rail, two tons of movable human ballast...
...Just chop off that dumb lead keel, saw away the central nine-tenths of the deck overhang, and splice on to the stubs the twin hulls of a big world-class catamaran...
...she was destined to continue the tradition of the sixteenth challenger...
...IT f the episode had not occurred, it would have been necessary for the producers of "Dallas" to invent it: a high-rolling Kiwi investment banker comes down with America's Cup fever...
...To win the 100 Guineas Cup of the All Nations Race, America had defeated vessels of double her displacement and sail area...
...When the defeated Liberty's mast was taken down the next morning, we discovered the obvious cause of the recent disaster...
...They had become used to winning races even in slow boats by a combination of meticulous teamwork, perfect sail handling, aggressive tactics, and, on occasion, by the tacticians' superior knowledge of the vagaries of Newport's fluky microclimate or the skipper's sheer force of will...
...One standard inference was that New York must not unfairly exploit the fundamental physics of monohull performance—hull length at the water determines the limit of hull speed through it—by building a defender of grossly superior length...
...of sail) versus Puritan (140 tons/7,982 sq...
...Pumped up and quivering in the breeze, she was the very model of a modern major Marconi rig, taut as a crossbow, bending like a reed...
...They can be sailed (not raced) by a half-dozen people...
...The British (and occasionally the Canadians) were Russell Seitz, an associate of Harvard's Center for International Affairs, has covered the America's Cup for Scientific American...
...A Fooand motah...
...Throwing up a rooster tail with other big racing multihulls presumes a fair bit of wind, and our eerie ascent past 15 knots was taking place in the conspicuous absence of whitecaps...
...Sopwith lost four straight races, one by eighteen minutes...
...And thence into the eel grass, not as a reaper, but skimming goose-wise and raising a bounty of greenflies...
...Fixed maximum dimensions and various trade-offs placed further emphasis on sophistication of materials and design...
...boat speed: somewhat higher...
...This piece is dedicated to the memory of the late Philip Weld, victor of the 1980 Observer Single-handed Trans Atlantic Race...
...The limits of human ingenuity and the constraints of the allowed materials of construction were being strained...
...Further Rules: There are no further rules except the sailing rules...
...Cheers, mate...
...What a way to travel...
...This international rule was, at least in its early days, no more complicated in its execution than the rules that govern off-shore racing...
...Out of Britain appeared Sceptre...
...Hell, it was fun...
...Sopwith (as in Camel, who died earlier this year in the 104th year of his age), won the first two of a four-wins-takes-all series...
...A cooler was passed aboard...
...Fay lost and so he did...
...Tactical skills and seamanship reached unprecedentedly high levels...
...Her skipper, T.O.M...
...Life is not fair...
...Then-exotic (and expensive) aerospace composite materials appeared in the rigging...
...ever try walking on jello during a major earthquake...
...This was not a sail but a rigid, symmetrical airfoil...
...The 12s had evolved over six generations to a level of hydrodynamic sleekness that a killer whale might envy...
...A light and balmy onshore breeze ruffled the waters of San Diego harbor as the inflatable tender's bulbous nose bumped gently against the catamaran's leeward hull...
...Aluminum alloys of dubiously low density were already in use...
...They were not alone...
...Whereupon a lady judge 200 miles from blue water awards him the cup by default...
...Essex Bay...
...We could recognize some faces from our earlier close encounter, and see her winch grinders and sail trimmers working hard to build speed...
...Having recovered their equilibrium, the NYYC afterguard won the next four straight...
...We flash by a goldplater, mahogany-bound and sitting pretty at anchor on the risen tide, A nice old fellow, taking cocktails on its ample fantail, bellows out the obvious: "Whatcha got in thea...
...One of his stiffest competitors for the right to challenge had been, seemingly improbably, New Zealand...
...A beaten Lord Dunraven stalked off in a snit, but corrosion was to be the ultimate victor—a year later Herreshoffs galvanic nightmare of bronze, wroughtiron, and aluminum fell apart...
...Yet there is hope for a vessel like New Zealand...
...I make the obvious inquiry: Oh no...
...It was disconcerting to watch Point Loma glide by through the transparent skins of gossamer mylar that clad its thick center section and movable slot...
...Sailing into New Zealand's lee, you could feel your eyes adjusting to the gloom...
...Dorothy, we're not in Newport anymore...
...These rules were honored more in the breach than in the observance...
...New York's America II did not, alas, fare very well...
...The 140-foot-long, fifteen-story high J-boats converged on unity of design as the twentieth century wore on...
...Nevertheless, it was but one of his seven consecutive winning designs, spanning the years from 1893 to 1920...
...Looming above us like a full-scale mock-up of a B-1 wing was Hard Rig MK II, 104 feet of skeletal carbon fiber...
...You could hear the shade of Commodore Stevens wail in anguish...
...The odds against the defense continuing its unbroken line of success now stood, on a coin-toss basis, at two to the twentieth power—worse than a million to one...
...Stripped of all the deadwood, the deed should read like this: Article 1.0...
...As tow tank testing of models and supercomputers co-evolved into the eighties, new possibilities swam dimly into view...
...But from New York's perspective, even though the odds against continuing their century-long winning streak were growing astronomical, the system was working...
...This masterpiece of Victorian pettifoggery contained, beneath the layers of modern amendments that allowed boats as small as 12 meters, a nineteenth-century codicil that demanded the acceptance of any challenge involving a boat no longer than 90 feet on the waterline, for a match with a "like boat...
...We fell away after crossing tacks and, as the challenger went onto her fastest point of sail, a beam reach, fell in a couple of hundred yards beside her...
...One of them, Columbia, was chosen in 1958 to revive the fight for the Cup...
...And so farewell, poor Michael Fay...
...Never was the word trampoline better employed in nautical jargon...
...High atop it, raking sharply aftward were the shark-fins, For the first time in history, somebody has been awarded a yachting trophy for losing races while sailing a slower boat...
...It was the boat's worst feature...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 paired vortex shedders, one for the main wing section, and one for the flap, working like the big feathers on a condor's wing tips...
...There, investment banker Michael Fay began to consider the fine print of a much amended document—the Deed of Gift dictating the terms incumbent upon the New York Yacht Club or whosoever should win the Cup from them...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 23...
...The walking sandbags of this latter-day racing scow could roll her onto a new tack like a dinghy by moving en masse across the 26-foot width of her overhang...
...Twice I landed hard, but the wear and tear was within normal limits...
...We started to do some semi-serious tacking on the way out, and I came to appreciate just how hard life was for the racing crew as they collectively bounded and bounced across the boat...
...I look forward to her effervescent rechristening, an event worthy of the Southern Hemisphere's premier Diva...
...her shadow weighed more than we did...
...She was morethan twice the size of any 12-meter, but only five tons heavier, carbon fiber on honeycomb from stem to stern: arguably the ultimate ultra-light monohull...
...I'm hiked out on the trapeze of a Tornado—the Olympic rule catamaran—twenty feet of one hull, like a knife in the water, and the other three feet out, running free in the air...
...Whereupon Herreshoff the youngerappeared on the scene to retune the defending Rainbow's rigging...
...D ut as war intervened and austerity consigned the big boats to all but oblivion, it became apparent that in the postwar environment towering vessels requiring professional crews of dozens of sailors to carry out the orders of the helmsmen and tactician were beyond the means of challenging and defending syndicates alike...
...And in a stiff breeze the wing's lift could approach the weight of the boat...
...T hat multihulls have come of age is 1 common knowledge abroad, for corporate-sponsored racing circuits like the Course d'Europe have captured the popular imagination like the unlimited air races of a generation ago...
...I've sailed some pretty extreme multihulls, but I just couldn't get used to the missing three or more tons of structural weight...
...So not just one, but two radical designs of promise were shipped down under to compete against dozens of 12s from a half dozen nations in the elimination series that would lead to the first American challenge since 1851...
...This harsh Darwinian fact was forged into my psyche at a tender age—scene: the North Shore...
...Dennis Conner had won three races with a slower boat, but the Australians hadwon four with a faster one...
...Although the period was host to the construction of a 236-foot three-masted schooner sporting 60 tons of depleted uranium as high-density ballast (she was, no kidding, built for the transatlantic single-handed race...
...Like Endeavor II, she lost four races in a row by margins of seven to twelve minutes...
...Within a half hour, I came to understand the meaning of two words with unprecedented clarity: big and slow...
...The applause was polite, but the champagne had lost its savor...
...How could something this big fly a hull clear out of the water in seven knots of wind...
...The New York Yacht Club was finally given a good scare in 1934 by Endeavor...
...Grandfather clauses allowed the venerable Intrepid to keep her high-tech mast top and remain competitive enough, with some alteration, to successfully defend twice in a row...
...She instructed both parties to sail the damned things and come back later if they insisted on further litigation...
...Easy: have a leisurely lunch, and, after raising the windward hull a dozen feet clear of the water for a better view of the opposition, harden up the rig to just this side of adamant, accellerate accordingly, and watch them shrink from sixteen stories high to a speck on the horizon...
...With brittle courtesy on the steps of Marble House, the Cup was handed over to a triumphant Alan Bond...
...Easily...
...No coin, very bad Joss...
...Commodore Stevens and his friends decided to take on the British Empire...
...I was lucky to get across standing up...
...Sheltered from the swell, and with a full day's tuning, the knotmeter broke through 18 for the first time...
...Only as the end of the nineteenth century drew near was it tacitly agreed that, rather than a race like the free-for-all at Cowes that started things, a confrontation of boats that were of about the same size was more seemly...
...She looked stiff as she was tall, twenty-two feet below her hull, twenty-four tons of lead hung on a knife-blade keel...
...The man seems doomed to wander the corridors of Albany to the end of time, messing about in courts...
...Hoboken) across the Hudson from its eponymous city made a momentous decision...
...They believed that the designer of the Port of New York's sharpest and fastest pilot schooners could build a vessel capable of overhauling the pride of the Royal Yacht Squadron...
...Article 1.2...
...The point was proved by Easterner, built for the Hoveys of Marblehead, who, with some friends, campaigned unsuccessfully for the right to defend against some higher-tech 12-meters...
...nothing if not consistent...
...So when the Australians came back for the fifth time in 1983 with designer Ben Lexcen's masterpiece, a keel that bifurcated into stubby wings at the bottom and whose lead edge sloped in the wrong direction, New York declined to take them to court and accepted instead the judgment of a panel of sailors...
...Since this was the hard wingsails' shakedown run—it had been mated to the hulls just hours earlier—Stars and Stripes was being handled with care...
...Resolution of Protests Concerning Articles 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3: The devil take the hindmost...
...Not much was spoken as we hardened up and headed out for the first encounter of the final version of the defender with New Zealand...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 21 By the late sixties, 12s had evolved in sophistication...
...A wooden 12-meter was (and is) arguably a "family" boat...
...Since the boat and the seven of us together weighed three and a half tons soaking wet (which by now we were), the acceleration was impressive...
...It was past noon, and well past La Jolla too, when the tell-tale tan sheen of the big kevlar main appeared to our northwest...
...They showed up by turns with twice the sail area or half the displacement of various defending yachts and still succeeded in losing all of the first seven challenges...
...They have logged 518 nautical miles in a day's run...
...We were sailing twice as fast as the wind, which, at the margin, is not a bad way to sail...
...There was nothing like her in the world...
...It was not so in absolute terms, but the performance of a Hobie cat in a stiff breeze is not to be expected in a boat the size of the inside lines of a tennis court...
...New York and NASA made common cause as 12-meters sailed into the Space Age...
...Whenever three people put a foot down in unison, somebody was at risk of getting the Eskimo blanket toss...
...And voila!—the finest kind of trimaran...
...The unthinkable had occurred...
...And so, in the winter of 1986, bleary-eyed at three in the morning, I witnessed by satellite link to Boston the world turned rightside-up: Conner had waxed the Aussies in four straight races...
...Just airborne...
...She had fallen off to ease my boarding, a small mercy, as I traversed the jury-rigged dacron rope and fishnet trampoline to get to the windward hull...
...So may Michael Fay enjoy many a day's island-hopping aboard Kiri Royale...
...With the advent of the twenty-second defender, Courageous (1974), it was generally thought that the performance envelope of 12-meters had pretty much been reached...
...With one hull flying, she boomed through the swells, trampoline awash, the aft cross-beam cleaving green water...
...Wind: S by W, 14 kts...
...A collective sigh of relief was heard from Newport to Northeast Harbor...
...The result was a fiasco...
...The bottom plate flared down to a titanium post-Chippendale ball and claw that nestled into a socket on the fore cross-beam like an artificial hip-joint...
...Some of these "matches" included Genesta (80 tons/7,150 sq...
...And on one occasion it did—Conner, in exploring Stars and Stripes's performance envelope, discovered a brave new world of nautical catastrophe—the dread reverse-camber liftout and capsize...
...in the early fifties, one could be built for less than $100,000...
...So when a New Zealand-built vessel twice the size of a 12 materialized in federal admiralty jurisdiction in California, the legality of this bizarre challenge was up to the Superior Court of the State of New York, Justice Ciparek presiding to decide...
...And so in ultramontane Albany, whose only direct contact with the Atlantic Ocean is in the form of smoked salmon and shad roe, the court established a truly novel precedent...
...Article 1.3...
...They left no more wake than a large dinghy...
...The question America answered in 1851 was simple: Who on earth can build the fastest boat in the world...
...Rutan and his crew of wing nuts had delivered more than the bare bolts...
...For the first time in history, somebody has been awarded a yachting trophy for losing races while sailing a slower boat...
...Attempts at radicaldeparture from Courageous lines produced only reductions in performance...
...It was a time of wooden ships and, to augment the efforts of the iron men, titanium mast-tops liberally stiffened with beryllium...
...On the second, in 1895, Britain's Valkyrie III and designer Nathaniel (the Wizard of Bristol) Herreshoffs Defender looked like peas in a pod, but, from the rail to the waterline, beneath her fair white paint, Defender was made of something newfangled called "aluminum...
...Only the helmsman and tactician had room to stroll aft of the wing...
...W e hove to, the tender beside us, as a couple of dozen turns of the turnbuckles on the two main shrouds imparted a bit of stiffness to the rig...
...versus Sappho (310 tons/9,060 sq...
...I n the years that followed, while the 1 East Coast shook with recrimination, Conner mustered a syndicate of unprecedented resources in San Diego...
...Talk about sailor's luck...
...So as surely as adrenaline and grog are conducive to going in harm's way, those of you who sail will be seeing more of multihulls...
...Not just hot rods like the one we were sailing, but sound cruising vessels capable of circumnavigation with kids on board (and, de gustibus, tough trimarans for rounding the Horn single-handed) have evolved in the last two decades...
...But just as Stars and Stripes would be the lawful prey of a windsurfer in a speed run in a gale, New Zealand belongs to the past...
...Symptomatic of this Corinthian revival was the earliest postwar defense, sailed in 12-meter (roughly 60 foot/30 ton) sloops...
...Not again...
...Upon which question, we with silent smiles reflect, "None required...
...12-meter technology was kept reined in...
...There was a general consensus that sailing as an amateur sport was more wholesome than the extravagant deployment of hired manpower the big old boats demanded...
...Likewise nothing "less dense than aluminum" could be used in the hull plating...
...He launches an antipodean Spar Wars project, only to see his acromegalic superscow blown away 2-0 by a cross between a giant Hobie cat and a pterodactyl on steroids...
...An hour later it was time to put on the brakes...
...So stay tuned...
...It was August 15, 1988, T minus twenty-six days...
...What we saw receding was no dinosaur, but a tour de force of hydrodynamics and materials science, her towering mast bristling with strain gauges and hydraulic spreaders...
...The seventies saw new rules to exclude materials heavier than lead from the ballast and those of "astronomical cost" throughout...
...With the acceleration, both literal and metaphorical, that science infuses into the history of marine architecture, will come a shift in yachting's leisurely paradigm...
...Aluminum hulls reappeared, this time monolithic and corrosion-proof...
...We were coming up on the Mexican border...
Vol. 22 • June 1989 • No. 6
