Above: the last part of the last leg of the last race of the 1983 America’s Cup – and the last time that an America’s Cup race was held off Newport, RI. Having dragged John Bertrand’s Australia II beyond the layline the America’s Cup defenders on Liberty are now forced to fetch back to the finish line in the wake of the about to be America’s Cup winner. After a bitterly fought contest off the water in 1983, in Fremantle Conner is in better spirits with Australia II designer Ben Lexcen (left). Very different from Newport, where (far left) a broken skipper was deserted by the New York YC committee that a month earlier had asked him to defend the Cup; Conner was then turned away again when he offered to challenge on the club’s behalf in Australia. The New York YC’s own campaign would flounder hopelessly in 1987. While Conner would bring the Cup home… to San Diego
To me, considering what we had to
work with in 1983 we did brilliantly. OK, we made some mistakes, but we took it right down to the wire and never gave up. The NYYC should have blamed them-
selves a little for not giving us more help, and understanding there was a winged keel coming, and knowing about the chal- lengers earlier. I guess on reflection I don’t hold that against the club because I think it was simply outside their knowledge base. SH: First key steps in the 1987 programme… apart from the money? TW: We started two years out from the Cup with Stars & Stripes 1985 training in Hawaii; actually, the 1985 and ’86 boat were roughly the same, with a different take on the bow and overall weight. Our plan early on was to use Liberty as
the trial boat. Nobody ever said Liberty was a fantastic design… it wasn’t at all! But that is what we had to start with even though we knew we had to go with a winged-keel boat. We put together the design team of the three guys, Britton Chance Jnr, Bruce
54 SEAHORSE
Nelson and Dave Pedrick, then we put John Marshall in charge of the design team. And that I think was a brilliant move, because to manage three designers was a brand new concept for us – it was something the Australians had a lot of knowledge about, but for us it was a hard one. And none of us could say ‘we sure know all about how a winged-keel works and performs now’. We had a good feeling of the pros and cons of that keel set-up, but that was about it at that time! Of course we knew the Fremantle boats
had to be more heavy-air oriented so we built some quite long 12 Metres, but in the end that was a mistake. If we depended on those long ’85 and ’86 boats we would have never made it to the Cup as we would have lost the trials; those two boats were very heavy-air oriented and the trials were pretty light, especially early on. As it was it’s well known that we
struggled with Stars & Stripes ’87, which was a shorter boat, so we were lucky we even made it to the America’s Cup. But once we got to the semis and the finals we
were in good shape as we had a boat that was good in a breeze, plus we could still hang in there in light air. SH: Basing your team in Hawaii was an inspired call… TW: Hawaii was a bold choice, but we were behind the curve in realising that everyone had smaller boats than we did and so it was dangerous from that point of view. Hawaii was inspired by logistics and proximity because Dennis and I both had jobs; he was trying to build a business around sailing and both of us needed to get back to the US regularly, so Hawaii was the perfect choice. The other thing was that in Hawaii we
trained in private – nobody seemed too worried about us and it was heavy air all the time. Honestly the best thing about Hawaii was we became so good in heavy air that by the time we got to Fremantle we were not intimidated by the big waves and breeze and we had developed better sailing techniques than the other challengers. So Hawaii was a bold choice, but the biggest danger was figuring out what size of boat
GILLES-MARTIN RAGET
DANIEL FORSTER/DPPI
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