Clockwise from left: Harold Vanderbilt prepares to race Enterprise in the first defender trials of 1930; an unwieldy early coffee grinder is used to tension the main halyard (led aft) on Rainbow – more unwieldy in the use than in the design; Endeavour sailing downwind in 1934 when rules still forbade a sail from being sheeted around the headstay – Sopwith’s challenger was the faster boat against Rainbow but less well sailed, she was also liberally decorated with strain gauges and wind measuring instruments by her aero engineer owner; a well-executed Park Avenue boom on Enterprise which was used in the 1930 defence – four years later Vanderbilt rejected a similar boom on Rainbow as too heavy; cranking the boom down to tension the mainsail luff on Endeavour; Ranger second mate Herman Wegge is engaged in the daunting task of hand-splicing large 7x17 galvanised cable
spinnaker was only effective in its narrow range of angles so once the wind went for- ward at all the ballooner went up. This sail had a big overlap like a genoa but was cut full with a big belly. It was a little like an asymmetric except it was hanked on to the headstay; it could not go to windward! By the 1934 and ’37 challenges the
double-luff, symmetric, parachute spinnaker had arrived along with the idea that bigger is better. But the new sail was still only used dead downwind otherwise the ballooner was called upon again. If a gybe was needed the Js still dropped the spinnaker, switched the pole and re-hoisted… except for Ranger which now had two poles and simply hoisted another spinnaker! And Ranger’s biggest parachute spinnaker was 10,000ft2
… Rod Stephens had already worked out
with the biggest jib topsail it was replacing. (In 1960 my heavy 53-footer Iolaire was
still a double-headsail cutter with a god awful big mainsail that gave a lot of weather helm, to the point it was said that ‘if anyone crewed on Iolaire for a couple of months you could spot him walking down the dock… the weather helm would have stretched his arms, his hands would be down to his knees and he would look like an orangutan’. So I found an old cotton quad which fitted and with it I found that almost all of the weather helm had disappeared. Needless to say, an old cotton sail in the tropics did not last too long and the weather helm returned until I cut down the size of the mainsail, increased the size of the headsails and also stepped a mizzen salvaged from the wreck of Ondine on the island of Anegada!) By the 1937 America’s Cup the modern
genoa had arrived. Its size was effectively unmeasured and so the sails quickly grew to the point that they became impossible to tack fast enough in anything except a very light breeze. Until modern coffee grinders were invented and first installed on Ranger, though the winches of the time were
powerful enough to manage a genoa physi- cally, they were so slow to trim that going to windward the Js would usually switch to the quad (failure to do this cost Endeavour her substantial lead in the fifth race of the 1934 Match which she lost to Rainbow). Super J Ranger solved the problem of
trimming her own massive genoa in two ways. First she had three coffee grinders that were so big that each could be driven by four men. Then they cut off enough clew to make their big sail into a quad as well, so the sail could be trimmed by the two sheets now leading to two of these big coffee grinders. Meanwhile, all their rivals with their tri-
angular genoas were struggling with inferior winches plus the much higher loads on a single sheet! Ranger carried four quads of different sizes and never ever used her spare triangular genoa inherited from Rainbow. In the 1930 series the spinnakers were still
the old single luff sail that had to be trimmed inside the headstay. They could not be gybed, so if it was necessary to gybe the spin- naker was dropped, the long pole switched to the other side, another spinnaker sent up in stops and broken out. The single-luff
how to gybe Ranger’s spinnaker using two poles without dropping the sail, but the race committee told him not to do so as the way the rule was then written it would be illegal. In fact, it would be another 60 years before a J boat spinnaker was gybed in the ‘normal’ way during an informal match-up between Endeavour II and Shamrock Vin 1996. On Ranger, once the wind was on the
quarter and the ballooner set, Rod Stephens had also persuaded Vanderbilt to trim the big sail by leading the sheet through a block on the end of the main boom then forward to a block on the rail, thence to a winch. Re-sheeting the ballooner to the end of the boom opened up the slot and allowed the main to be eased considerably – boat speed clearly increased. The only problem was that since the sheet went through an almost 180° turn it was extremely loaded. Ranger exploded more than a few blocks before one could be built strong enough. Arthur Knapp, in charge of sail trim on
Ranger, when racing on Ondine, the boat on which I started my own big boat racing career in 1954, insisted that Ondine’s owner Huey Long have his boom altered so that when reaching we could trim our big genoa out to the end. This always increased our speed by ½ to 1kt… * The genoa jib had first appeared in 1927 on Sven Salen’s 6 Metre in Genoa, Italy. Part II… turning winches
q SEAHORSE 57
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