The one great yachting improvement – Part II
The contestants in the 1920 America’s Cup may have shied away from the much anticipated switch from gaff to Marconi rigs, but already the tide of technology was turning. John Rousmaniere recalls a very different age...
Following an unprecedented – before or since – rig development truce between the two contenders for the 1920 America’s Cup, Resolute’s amateur skipper, the 52- year-old Charlie Adams, did not hide his relief at having dodged a bullet. It looked more than likely that designer Charles Nicholson had already made big strides with a planned switch to a new Marconi rig
for Thomas Lipton’s
challenger, Shamrock IV, a switch that would have left the New York Yacht Club defender with a considerable amount of catching up to do in a limited amount of time. But now Resolute and Shamrock would race each other under their existing
30 SEAHORSE
gaff rigs… albeit with refinements, not all of which proved successful. By the end of 1919 Shamrock had been
laid up in Brooklyn for more than five years, following the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 while she was already en route from Europe. Though she was by now receiving a number of technical updates, Shamrock had never actually competed in American waters. Meanwhile, her oppo- nent, Resolute, would come to the 1920 Cup Match with two successful summers of racing behind her during 1914 and 1915. Charlie Adams’ afterguard and crew of Scandinavian regulars, under the com- mand of Charlie Barr’s former first mate Chris Christensen, were skilled and com- patible, although there were grumblings that Charlie Adams was not allowed suffi- cient control over strategy and tactics. Hoping to match the Nicholson boat in one way at least, Adams and the syndicate had the Herreshoff yard build for Resolute a sophisticated new hollow wooden mast with a lightweight new gaff. Unfortunately, the new mast exploded in the first race that she sailed in her subsequent tune-up trials against Vanitie, and then, in the first race against Shamrock for the Cup, the gaff broke, forcing Resolute to quit for the day. These failures were just two reminders
of Nicholson’s skills and what Adams called ‘his very considerable originality of thought and courage in adopting his ideas’. Nicholson’s studies of aircraft and aero- dynamics led him to the importance of a foil’s leading edge. He cleaned up the airflow around Shamrock IV’s mast with fairing strips made of bolts of sailcloth wrapped around the spar and extending several feet aft along the boom. (After Shamrock IV used this fairing gear in the first race in the 1920 series, the New York Yacht Club race committee advised that they regarded this as added sail area and would remeasure the boat should she use it again.)
The masts themselves were wooden, small in diameter and hollow, with weight watching focused aloft. Long before the development of lightweight extruded aluminium masts in the 1940s, these spars were intricate structures of long, narrow spruce staves assembled in a box or oval shape using some of the glues that were developed for fighter planes, such as casein, an adhesive derived from milk protein that had been perfected during World War I.
The closest possible Cup Match Astonishingly, Resolute lost the first two races – the first when the new gaff broke, the second to wind shifts that allowed
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