The one that got away. It’s easy to forget that before he (successfully) joined Team New Zealand for the America’s Cups of 2013 and 2017 (and 2021), the 10-time A-Class cat world champion Glenn Ashby was head coach for Oracle’s DoG Match challenge of 2010 and in charge of getting Spithill & Co. up to speed in multihulls. Following their Cup win Ashby took Spithill along as crew for the 2010 Little America’s Cup in Newport RI ... where the pair were comfortably seen off by Canadian defenders Fred Eaton and Magnus Clark. Multiple C-Class champion Clark is one of the most highly regarded cat specialists on the planet and Oracle took him on for the DoG match... as nightwatchman to sleep on USA 17 and keep her pointed into the wind. Clark did not return for the following Cup in 2013
sailing monohulls ever since. ‘Initially I didn’t give multihulls enough credit,’ Spithill says. ‘Like anything else, you shouldn’t give an opinion about something unless you’ve tried it.’ When Spithill returned to the team base
in Valencia, Kiwi engineer and Cup- winning navigator Mike Drummond was lying in wait for him with his A-Class cata- maran. ‘I dragged him off kicking and screaming,’ Drummond says. ‘It was a day when the sea breeze was fully developed, with a steep chop. It was a tough day to sail. ‘The A-Class is a quick boat. It’s 18ft long
with a 30ft mast. The total weight of the boat, all up and ready to sail, is 165lb. It’s the greatest boat I’ve ever sailed, and a hand- ful the day Jimmy took it out. ‘I watched from the chase boat and had
to chuckle. But I was also impressed. The waves were quite big. It was hard not to be washed off the boat going upwind, and diffi- cult to avoid stuffing the bow in downwind. Jimmy’s skill and athleticism, his ability to handle the boat in those conditions without damaging it – which I was pretty relieved about – and without capsizing, was very impressive. I threw him in the deep end and he survived. He came through just fine.’ As a group the team next jumped into
the Extreme 40 class of catamarans, which though first launched in 2005 still promised a challenge. They didn’t disap- point. Australia’s Glenn Ashby was now on hand as a coach for the team’s first go- round in the X40s. Ashby is one of the best
58 SEAHORSE
small multihull sailors in the world, having won numerous A-Class world titles, two Tornado world championships and a silver medal in the Tornado with skipper Darren Bundock at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. [Since his time at Oracle he has won several more A-class titles… plus of course the America’s Cup as the skipper of Team New Zealand in Bermuda in 2017]. ‘Glenn is a freak,’ Mike Drummond
says with a laugh. In Kiwi-speak, that is an ultimate compliment from one A-Class sailor to another. Ashby would disappear into his Olympic campaign after the X40 session, but he would return. Sailors new to multihulls are always
concerned about pitchpoling. ‘We got that issue out of the way on the first day,’ Glenn Ashby says with a laugh. ‘It was very windy,’ Spithill recalls,
‘with an offshore breeze coming off the mountains in Valencia. We were going fast, and there was talk of bearing away. Glenn says no matter what happens you have to commit to it, so round we went – it seemed a bit dodgy, but he said commit, so we committed, and over we went. Actually it turned out the release valve on the hydraulics for the mainsheet wasn’t work- ing. We hit it and nothing happened. We laughed about that later on. ‘But it was a good thing. You have to be
able to do that in the smaller boats because that is how you learn – push it over the edge and see what happens, what it feels like. You do the same thing in dinghies.
‘The 40-footer isn’t that small, but it is a
size you can push, tip over and be OK, not hurt the boat or the people. You can’t do that with the Orma 60s…’ But the Ormas have to be an essential
part of any multihull learning curve when the goal is a boat nearly twice that size. Because USA 17 began life as a scaled-up version of the Orma 60 Groupama, simi- larly designed by the team’s French designers VPLP, it made sense to go and sail on that very boat. That meant getting together with Groupama skipper Franck Cammas, one of the most talented and respected skippers in the world of offshore multihulls. Cammas gave up studying piano for
racing multihulls, and his success on the water has made it look like a smart move. He won all the Orma grand prix events in 2005 and 2006, won the Orma world championship five times and held [at the time] seven passage records, including the record for sailing non-stop around the world for the coveted Jules Verne Trophy set in January to March 2010 on the 100ft tri Groupama 3. (Cammas later won the 2012 Volvo Ocean Race in 70ft mono- hulls… but that’s another story!) As early as March 2008 a group of
sailors from Oracle Racing organised a trip to Lorient, France, on the Brittany coast, for a two-week training session on Cammas’s lightweight 60ft X 60ft Orma Groupama 2. Among the afterguard were Russell Coutts, James Spithill and Ameri- can John Kostecki, who had first joined
CHRISTOPHE LAUNAY
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