we needed – we finally figured that out after watching the 1986 12 Metre World Championships, which we chose not to compete in. SH:How difficult were all the different design choices? TW: I think the boat was a hard choice… I have to give John Marshall an incredible amount of credit there. He got the best out of the designers – and in my opinion any one of the designers on their own wouldn’t have been good enough, not because they are not good designers, but because John was unique in understanding what he should look at and what he should ignore. When he was being fed a bit of hyperbole or when one of the guys was a little weak in an area he knew how to fill that gap, which was vital. Brit Chance would probably bring eight
good things and the final two would have had a problem, whereas John knew what those last two final issues were. Bruce Nelson is also a fantastic designer but may have been a little too San Diego oriented, too light for the breeze or maybe not, we don’t know, but John pulled it all together. But even much later on we were still
focusing on too big a boat… so, yes, the design choice was hard. SH: The loads were going to be enormous… more than had ever been seen on a 12 Metre before. TW: I think we had that figured out pretty well and sailing in Hawaii we probably sorted that out earlier than anyone else. Again we concentrated on probably too high a wind range and so focused on loads that were too high for the whole event – but we did well as we got any issues out of the way early. Other teams had to do that as they went along in Fremantle. SH:What sort of ‘exotic’ materials were now available to you?
56 SEAHORSE
with it. Tom Schnackenberg led the way in 1983 with warp-oriented Kevlar, which was way better than cross-cut, so I think a lot of our sails ended up being warp- oriented tri-radial sails. Remember that I left Sobstad in the
Top: the home crowd did Australia proud and rooted for the USA team almost as much as they cheered on their own side. ‘Every day another 500 people were on the wall cheering for us!’ said a startled member of Conner’s crew afterwards. Above: the young Chris Dickson lit up the Louis Vuitton Cup before crashing into Conner and his heavy-air 12 Metre just as the Fremantle Doctor settled in. But the Kiwis later upset a lot of people when they agreed to tune up with the Cup defenders Kookaburra – though they probably did as much harm as good to the Australian cause when in many conditions their fibreglass 12 Metre proved the faster boat
TW: It wasn’t the first time that Kevlar was used as a sailmaking material, Kevlar was getting quite mature by then, and the lami- nates available were quite a bit better qual- ity, and so from a sailmaking point of view it was better. For the mast it was still alu- minium and that is really a horrible mater- ial to make a mast out of because below its load case it can still fail pretty easily. I don’t think we made any breakthrough there, but we did end up with a pretty light mast. There was thought about trying to use
carbon in the sails – but honestly we didn’t dare do that in the breeze. It was so early on and carbon was so brittle we really didn’t have adhesives that worked well
middle of all this, and so we started build- ing a lot of our own sails with a couple of really good machinists and a guy called Bill Peterson who worked closely with me. I did the designs and he executed them and we called them WE-BE sails, because we- be guessing! Honestly it wasn’t very sophisticated, but I knew the shapes we were looking for so well that we really didn’t need to be that sophisticated… SH: Breakages and injuries? TW: I don’t remember any serious injuries. We had some failures, some sails break, but in Hawaii we got pretty good at sailing in the breeze – and what we did stayed private. We sailed in big waves every day and crashed off them – Dennis was really good at that, he said we would take the heavy-air failure part of the equation away, plus any intimidation or discomfort of sailing in big breeze and waves, and that was a brilliant idea. We were a little behind the curve when we first got to Fre- mantle sailing in light airs – even though we were decent light-air sailors we lost races against other teams at the beginning. We lost to Team NZ in the October trials and the November trials… we lost to New York early on too. SH:How was Dennis through the training and early round-robins? Did you have to rev him up… or calm him down? TW: He was pretty solid. He had a lot of pressure to raise enough money. Certainly building our third boat, Stars & Stripes ’87, put a lot of heat on the guys raising the money, and the decision about that came quite late. I remember getting the
GILLES-MARTIN RAGET
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