More tales from the America’s Cup...


Dave Hollom picks up the tale en route to Sweden, following Dennis Conner’s consummate performance with Stars & Stripes in Fremantle in 1987


Aggravated by the delay in confirming the details for the next Defence, by the start of 1988 the America’s Cup was once again back in court. The tedious wait as one court hearing after another seemed to end- lessly flow by meant that many once enthusiastic Cup players looked elsewhere for their sporting aggrandisement. America’s Cup team owners are not the


sort of people who lack choices. The walk- aways included the funder of the 1987 UK effort, the late Graham Walker, whose withdrawal from the competition left me temporarily unemployed. Up until then I had kept pretty busy.


There was the 1988 12 Metre Worlds in Lulea, Sweden to prepare for, using my ‘discarded’ and little-loved Crusader 2 design, a boat with little or no development


54 SEAHORSE


since her launch two years earlier. In fact, at a very light regatta our long and narrow boat did us proud, finishing fourth in the fleet racing and winning the ‘Midnight Sun Cup’ finale. The latter was a race that, as the name


suggests, started at midnight on mid - summer’s day and, because Lulea lies close to the Arctic Circle, was in full daylight throughout. After the finish the rest of the night was spent in the hotel sipping cham- pagne until after dawn. Sadly Graham Walker himself was not there to join the celebrations; instead he was in hospital having been involved in a serious accident involving his Bentley and a motorway bridge. After he had done so much to single- handedly keep Britain in the America’s Cup Graham’s absence was keenly felt. After the 1988 Worlds and then Dennis’s


later trouncing of Michael Fay in the 27th edition of the America’s Cup, in San Diego, a movement largely led by some more prominent members of the yachting press was urging for a move to a newer, more modern boat that better reflected the type of boat more popular with the


yachtsmen of the day. This led to numer- ous designer meetings over the winter of 1988/89 to come up with a suitable new Cup class and in which I was representing Graham’s interests. To this day I feel that it was a great


mistake to ditch the 12 Metre, which had served the event admirably since the recommencement of the event after the Second World War. The boats not only perform well over a


range of conditions – they always look, except in a flat calm, to be moving through the water with some speed and grace even if, in reality, they are quite slow. They are also a delight to sail, but are difficult to get the best out of and so offer the sailors a good challenge. And they are also difficult for the designer to gain an advantage. Getting so much displacement to move


through the water with less drag is a real challenge. This means that progress in design is generally slow with break- throughs possible but rare, meaning that old boats are likely to (and did) remain competitive over long periods. This in turn means that there is a ready supply of boats


MAURIZIO GAMBA/ALAMY


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