Left: Herreshoff’s 1903 masterpiece Reliance in dry dock. At 201-foot overall and with a 220-foot tall rig Reliance was the largest yacht ever to race for the Cup (PS: she won). She also featured a stripped interior and underdeck winches… for her 64-strong crew. Above: an early experiment in composite construction, Defender, launched in 1895, was a case study in electrolysis. A combination of aluminium, steel and bronze, all in a salt environment, she fizzed from the start and her disintegrating hull was scrapped in 1901
up close; faster speeds; higher skills and much greater athleticism.
If the Valencia boats were breathtaking the San Francisco AC72s were mesmerising. The next step towards AC35 in Bermuda in less than two years’ time has been called regressive. AC50 after the AC72? The game is now about putting power from the wing, through the plat- form and into the foils, and how that power is controlled.
sprouted above the minimum wetted surface U-sectioned hull. Bang up to date though KZ-1 was, she definitely took a backward glance toward the J-Class of the 1930s, and even towards the true giants of the America’s Cup, the pre-WWI Universal Rule behemoths epitomised by Reliance.
If the Kiwis reckoned their head start on the Deed of Gift challenge gave the Ameri- cans no chance to design and build their own big monohull, they were right. The Americans created their own solu- tion: a wing-sailed catamaran at half the length. Dennis Conner’s Stars&Stripes was, in the words of his design co-ordina- tor John Marshall, the ‘neatest, fastest sail- boat’ we could come up with.
So the high-tech, high-speed multihull Cup pretty much started in 1988 and the acrimonious 27th Match. Not the equally pistols-at-dawn 33rd Match of Valencia in 2010, breathtaking though the scale was of Alinghi V and BOR90. What was created for the 34th Match in San Fran- cisco 2013 was a logical extension of that thinking, all designed to fit in the space Russell Coutts believed would revitalise the Cup: compressed timeframe for races; compacted racetrack brought inshore and
The length of the boat is not really material other than as a cost that can be reduced, while performance remains not merely the same, but is enhanced. Prior to the climactic match between Oracle and Emirates Team New Zealand in September 2013, the drumbeat against high-speed multihulls had been monoto- nously persistent. It was an interesting test of the resistance to change. No one was pretending that modern multihulls were going to create the elegant evocations of the Big Boats and J-Class, or even the easy- on-the-eye 12 Metres and Version 5.0 ACC monohulls. The monohull vs multi- hull debate still persists even after the case- proven match in San Francisco. 2013 did capture the imagination of a newer, wider non-sailing audience. And the more knowledgeable sailing audience still tune in, and either continue the pro vs anti- multihull debate or remain agnostic. Inte- gral to the America’s Cup position in our sport is that anyone can have an opinion about how to do it better. And many do… Yet the past-is-better mantra cuts across everything that the America’s Cup has ever stood for. It has always been modernising and forward-looking from the day in the century before last that Commodore John Cox Stevens, along with his brother
Edwin, J Beekman Finlay, James Hamilton and George L Schuyler, accepted the invi- tation from the Royal Yacht Squadron to come over to race. In commissioning America from George Steers, her owners had a far more progres- sive yacht than any of those that competed against her in that famous race around the Isle of Wight on 22 August 1851. America’s fine entry, swept forefoot, hollow waterlines, shallow hull, beamy after-sections, raked masts and flat, cotton sails were the chalk to the British yachts’ cheese: all cod’s head and mackerel tails, deep-gutted hulls, sturdy masts on which were bent canvas sails. Hold a model of America in your hands today and rotate it… well, she still looks fast even now.
Since the 1850s the game has always moved on, often staccato like, rather than in a smooth progression. There have been jumps in progress as well as stalls. Evolu- tion with the occasional revolution. The Seawanhaka Rule yachts of the 1889-1903 matches substantially moved the America’s Cup on from the saltwater salon era (yes, Lt Henn’s plank-on-edge style Galatea really did race with leopard skins on her cabin sole and a pet monkey in the crew) to a purer form of racing yacht. This was an era belonging to designers Nathanael Herreshoff, George Lennox Watson, Bowdoin Croninshield and their cohort, and what yachts they created. These were fabulously expensive yachts, in the realm of £500,000… at pre-WWI prices. No wonder the American owner- ship syndicates were large and packed a financial punch with the likes of the Morgan and Iselin banking, or Vanderbilt railroad, families bankrolling them.
SEAHORSE 35
UNITED STATES LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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