Left: 1980 and Dennis Conner drags the America’s Cup into the world of the ‘no excuse to lose’ professional campaign – to quote his own book title. In 1977 the bulk of US crews were amateurs, they typically received expenses but only a few were on a payroll. When Conner took full control of the Freedom syndicate for 1980 all that changed and the team tested, trained and practised in the summer in Newport RI before moving to San Diego for the winter. Not everybody was happy with the new full-time approach, 1977 Cup winner Ted Turner verbalised his objections in his own way… ‘340 days a year, 340 days in a sailboat. That’s what he [DC] spent – and him a grown man and all.’ When the time came for Conner to head to Fremantle after losing in 1983, 340 days had become three years of working up boats and crews. Stars&Stripes got through five 12 Metres before settling on the Cup-winning ‘Super-12’, USA-55 (above)
we try to get it down. I figured the guy was pretty fit and he could probably swim although the water was still really cold. ‘We finally get the spinnaker down and
I knew what direction I was going so I slowly head back in the opposite direction, just with the mainsail. And I find the guy! ‘Thank God he was smart enough to take
his boots and foul-weather pants off and make a float with them. Jimmy Walker was his name and it scared the everloving s--t out of me! So that’s my first story of 12 Metre sailing! Four weekends we stayed in the cabins at Castle Hill in the guest cottages – it looks grand but it was cold as ****. ‘At the end of May we were going to
commission Freedom then bring it up to speed in Newport. I had been sailing with the crew on Enterprise, getting them and the boat up to speed. So when I turn up on day one I figure Dennis will have left me the crew I had been training with on Enterprise and he’s gonna be out sailing Freedom. ‘I’m walking down the dock to the
tender and now everybody’s calling me Sir! “Let us know when you’re ready to go, Sir!” In fact, Dennis has left me Free- dom and he takes Enterprise. He says, “Let me know when you get out and have the (brand new) Freedom all tuned up and ready to go…” ‘The crew is all waiting on the dock for
me. I was intimidated. Kenny Gunderson is the captain of the tender Chaperone, he is also calling me Sir and asks “what time would you like to leave the dock?” ‘So far I’ve been sailing off the dock and
I’ve never even been towed out. So every- body’s in whites and, you know, I look like sh*t and Olin Stephens is standing next to me in the back of the boat and I need to get ready to sail against Dennis! ‘So we head out. We tuned the boat, got
the rig tuned, tried some of the sails… this takes maybe a couple of hours and you know Olin and crew are looking at me like I know what I’m doing, which you know I kind of did, then again… I see Enterprise coming down the channel at about 3pm. All of a sudden I hear Dennis on the radio, “Are you ready to go?” and I said “sure”. Not another word is spoken. He drops his chute and, sure enough, he puts Enterprise on the wind bang next to us and we start going. ‘By now of course Olin Stephens is all
freaked out because he wants Freedom to be faster than Enterprise, but remember Enterprisewe had worked on for 15 days at this point so it was pretty well wound up. So we go along for about 10 minutes and there’s nothing in it, the boats are freaking dead even, maybe we on Freedomhad a bit of an edge which spoke well for a new boat. ‘We get up to the left of the channel
towards Fort Adams. Now I’m getting close to shore and I’m looking over at Dennis who obviously doesn’t give a f***. So I yell over “room to tack” and he goes “you tack first” then he tacks right on my face. I guess he doesn’t care too much about his brand new 12 Metre. ‘Now we’re having a tacking duel and I
go “room to tack” again, and again he tacks right on my face. This goes on for the next half hour as we’re shoreline tacking up the left bank. At that moment I knew this was going to be a long summer. ‘So that was the first day of sailing
against Dennis Conner and me being his trial skipper… Truth is it was pretty cool. I looked at Olin at the end of the day and Dennis goes, “Hey, Olin, this is the first day with your brand new boat, Enterprise is all tuned up so I think that speaks pretty well.” ‘We spent the entire summer just racing
and tuning. Hours and hours and hours and getting up early and staying up late and debriefing and whatever, and you know we got those two boats pretty fast at the end of the summer. Then Dennis goes to do the Fastnet – the bad one when people died – and while he was gone he just said to keep the campaign going. ‘But then he adds how much he appreci-
ates all I’d done for him that summer, “so I’m going to let you build me whatever kind
SEAHORSE 49
GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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