underperform on the water and you can be replaced in a heartbeat, but install a hydraulic fitting badly inside a wing and the day, or much worse, is ruined. With eight races on the last day of the 34th America’s Cup in
San Francisco, a pin broke on Oracle’s AC72 wing while the crew were tuning up for the deciding race. Shore crew Jeff Causey was sent up the rig to repair it with fast-drying epoxy, and with just minutes to spare descended back down and jumped into the chase boat. For that entire final race Causey stared straight ahead in silence, locked in to the significance of what he had just done and unable to speak to his team-mates. As history tells us, the repair just held. As team boss Grant
Simmer later commented, ‘If that repair hadn’t held, that would have been a lousy way to lose the America’s Cup.’ For these AC World Series events the AC45s the teams use are
robust and relatively simple. The hydraulics are reliable, the elec- tronic systems plug and play, meaning when the boats leave the dock Henderson and shore crew have confidence in the them holding together. That will soon change, as ‘Hendo’ explained. ‘The newer AC45-Turbos we’re now using in Bermuda are the
test beds for all the new systems that have evolved and will continue to evolve. Basically, five blokes set up these boats here in Portsmouth, but back in Bermuda we have close to 50… we are allowed to sail the AC50s from late December, but obviously we need to validate the systems prior to installing them in the 50s. These boats are many, many times more complex than the ones the public are seeing in Portsmouth.’ The hydraulic systems involved are being designed and constructed to an absolute minimum weight so tolerance levels are really tight… and things are still developing even as the final build is underway. But already the designers and engineers need to be making firm decisions, so they have to go with the data in front of them ‘today’, committing now to components in the most complex and tech-driven America’s Cup ever. So what will the shore crew role for someone like Henderson
entail in Bermuda next year? ‘For the last campaign I was in a chase boat for every race. Firstly, onboard the AC72 until we got the jib up, then sailed with the guys to make sure everything was fine until just before the 10-minute gun, then I jumped back into a chase boat. We had materials and tools in the RIB we hoped for every contingency, and that worked well… so I guess a more or less similar programme but with loads more spares and tools!’ Almost on cue, a call came back from the Oracle boat racing in Portsmouth. Wing trimmer Kyle Langford later described what happened. ‘We suddenly felt that even though we had our weight in our usual positions, we had to use more daggerboard rake on the starboard than on the port side to get up on the foils, so we weren’t sure if we’d hit something with one of the rudders.’ Andrew Henderson swam the boat when it returned to the
mooring and discovered impact damage on the rudder foil. The first job was to get clearance from event director Iain Murray for the
R B O > STRUCTURAL S T R U C T U R A L
& FLYING SAILS FURLERS INT E RNAL
L O C K S 3 DIFFERENT ARI
& F L Y ING S A I L S F U R L E R S > INTERNAL LOCKS 3 E X T E RNAL
50 TONS SWL 50 TONS > EXTERNAL LOCKS 230 TONS LOCKS 2 30 TONS SWL
O N S SWL ONS SWL
> STANDARD & CUSTOMIZED TERMINAL OPTIONS STANDARD & CUSTOMIZED TERMINAL OPTIONS > D FFERENT A RTICULATING PARTS
C U S T O M I Z E D T E R M I N A L OPTIONS TICULATING PARTS
O P T I O N S
AS B O A T C A P T A N S KNOW OU CAN CHOOSE Y
AS BOAT CAPTAINS KNOW I YOU C A N CHOOSE Y
KNOW THE W E A T H E R . .
N O W, C H O O S E YOUR YOUR
FURLER B R A N D, BUT NOTFURLER BRAND BUT N O T THE WEATHER...
Loic Lemignon, Ultim'
emign Boat captain
non,
Oracle shore boss Andrew Henderson takes pictures every step of the way as he repairs two small dings in the team’s rudder to avoid falling foul of the strict AC rules on structural ‘repairs’
www.facnor.com SEAHORSE 21
BLUE ROBINSON
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