board and rudder on the central hull, smaller rudders on the floats and small, curved foils to provide lift. We later settled on much larger, curved Orma 60-style daggerboards on the floats, with no board in the central hull. Michel Kermarec lived and breathed the appendage development.’ ‘Soon there was also talk of building a


completely new boat,’ Tim Smyth says, ‘using the first one for practice. The idea was to take the boat to Valencia as soon as possible since the regatta would be there. ‘But sending an undeveloped boat to


Spain wouldn’t work because the rule says the boat had to be built here. In Valencia you couldn’t even change a rudder. But a new boat was the plan for a long time. For the build team it was scary…’ ‘Even so it took a lot of work to arrive


at the right position and shape for the foils,’ Mike Drummond says. ‘By the time we had the confidence to proceed the first floats were already under construction.’ ‘We definitely had to rework the floats!’


Smyth says smiling. ‘One was already joined, complete, with a very nice paint finish. Having to cut that open was depressing…


‘For builders you can imagine the job, a


115ft-long, narrow thing a small man can only crouch inside that also has heaps of bulkheads. And adding the bigger curved foils meant the load on the floats would now be 30 per cent higher, so we had to go back in, rip out the inside skin, put in core reinforcement, add extra layers inside and out, and rework them. ‘The big foils were Mark Turner’s


babies, and required a superhuman effort to build. At 20ft long and 6in thick where they exit the floats, and 3ft wide, they had to sustain a 90-ton side load at the exit. ‘The structural combination was


impressive. Titanium, high-strength steel, autoclaved carbon and exotic plastics came together to create this huge foil that had to swivel and slide under load and be accurately controlled. And there were two sets, one for the upwind-downwind course of Race 1; the other set more curved for reaching around the triangle of Race 2. ‘They were very difficult to engineer to


make them light and strong enough, and very hard, and very expensive, to build. ‘I know Alinghi built 10 daggerboards before they got four that didn’t break…


It’s now stressful to recall those days.’ ‘My name was mud with Tim, that’s for


sure,’ Mike Drummond says. ‘But in the end it was do we lose, or do we win? If we put the new appendage configuration on, it was so much faster in light air that we had a chance. If we hadn’t done it I was confident we would lose in light air. ‘The margins I’m talking about, in less


than 7kt of wind, are big. On the VPP the new appendages were worth something like 40 minutes around the course, roughly speaking. It was a chance we had to take.’ USA 17 and its various parts were craned


onto a barge on 26 September 2008 for the week-long trip down the Pacific Coast to San Diego. The plan was to be in San Diego for two-months’ training before the whole show shipped to Valencia. As it turned out, San Diego would be home for 14 months, wreaking havoc with Oracle employees who’d already moved families to Spain. And while the ‘temporary’ camp at the


Convention Center (the same patch of asphalt Dennis Conner used in the 1988, 1992 and 1995 Stars & Stripes campaigns), and less-than-convenient accommodation would have sufficed for two months, they 


SEAHORSE 59


PHOTOS GILLES MARTIN-RAGET


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