When Dennis Conner defended the Cup in San Diego in 1988 with a wing-masted cat (also co-designed by Dave Hubbard) the Stars & Stripes crew rolled the entire boat and rig on its side overnight so the wing was horizontal. USA 17 was a bit on the large side for that, so Hubbard and Paul Bieker came up with this gin-pole based system – familiar round the world to hundreds of owners of the late Ian Farrier’s superb folding trimarans
winch. We were literally five seconds from bearing away and there was this enormous crack and the thing just came down.’ ‘When it went,’ Jimmy Spithill says, ‘we
The boat launched with a 50m spar. After
the first day of sailing trimmer Dirk de Ridder remembers talking to fellow-trimmer Ross Halcrow about how it had all felt. ‘We’d been told the boat was going to be extremely overpowered with a 50m mast,’ de Ridder says, ‘that it was dangerously high. After sailing that first time it didn’t feel dangerous at all, or even close to the edge.’ Mast 2 started at 55.3m. During con-
struction it grew to 58.8m. It went into the boat in October 2008 for trials in San Diego. Again there was no feeling of being overpowered. Mast 3, at 60.8m, was begun almost immediately. Mast 3 was length- ened to 66.3m while under construction. Then in 2009, exactly one week after
the bitter battle over the Cup venue had finally been won by Oracle, mast 3 came down while sailing off San Diego… ‘We were flying,’ Dirk de Ridder says. ‘We had the mast moved forward that day, and we’d moved the baby-stay up one notch. Mike Drummond was onboard, and he said the mast didn’t look right. ‘We said OK, we’ll bear away, we’ll
unload and put the baby-stay back where it was. I was in the middle under the boom ready to ease the main because we were on full load, and the first 4 or 5m of ease is pretty loaded so you have to watch the
were probably doing 20kt going upwind, full load. It was just a snap of the fingers, bang! That’s why it threw guys off the boat. The platform I was standing on split in half. I came down and hammered my ribs on the wheel. I saw our navigator, Mateo, standing looking at it and I screamed at him. He jumped out of the way. It was loud, the most violent thing I’ve ever been a part of. Rosco [trimmer Ross Halcrow] was the other concern because he was under it all.’ Fortunately Halcrow was wearing a
helmet because the previous day he had noticed more bend in the boom and was afraid it might break. ‘By the time I worked out the rig was coming down,’ he recalls, ‘all I had time to do was lie on the trampoline as low as possible. The boom ended up on top of me. The mast came to rest on my primary winch drum. It ended up about 6in above me where I was tucked into the netting next to the hull.’ For Joey Newton it was his worst fear
realised. ‘I was terrified a lot of the time on that boat,’ Newton says. ‘All of us in the middle of the boat were in the firing line if something broke. We talked about it a lot. ‘When the mast broke I was trimming the
traveller, looking up at the rig just as the mast popped to weather. I took two steps and just jumped into the water. I remember hoping the chase boats wouldn’t run over me. I stuck my head up and the chase boats had stopped. I ended up 100ft from the boat. I jumped pretty early! The guys give me grief about that… Rosco was under it, poor bloke. He needs to do more speed work so he can get out of the road quicker.’ Meanwhile, the wingsail had recently arrived in San Diego. Core Builders had
finished it in six months, ahead of sched- ule. It was a remarkable achievement given that it came at nearly the end of what had already been a two-and-a-half year, full- court press. When the Middle East venue of RAK was announced Mike Drummond had immediately asked for an 8m exten- sion on the wing to deal with the light wind there. The job took its toll. ‘In the end it was deeply satisfying,’ Tim Smyth says. ‘It was also impossible… but you’re in a position where you can’t back out. ‘We replaced the build team two times,
burned people out, imported new people from all over the world. The reality is you work harder. We had one guy who worked 3,349 hours in one year. That’s an average work week of 67 hours. And every hour he worked he was productive. He’s a legend around here.’ In the end Smyth and Turner set their
backs against the plan to fly the wingsail to Valencia. The idea was to ship the boat, finish work on the wing and then fly it to Spain. Most of the wing was in manage- able pieces, but each flap was 7.5m2. Building protective boxes was a big job. Getting those boxes into even the largest aircraft would be a risk. ‘We wrote a big report,’ Smyth says, ‘basically saying that flying the wing to Valencia was insanity. ‘We said they had to take delivery of the
wing in San Diego, test-sail it in San Diego and ship it with the boat to Spain. We had to pull six weeks out of the timeline for finishing the wing to do that. But part of that was saved if we didn’t have to screw around figuring how to get it on a plane.’ ‘Even moving it around the compound
the thing was like a big, fragile egg,’ Tim Smyth says. ‘Any way we chose to rest it on itself was not ideal.’ The day mast 3 went down, the wingsail was less than a week from being finished.
SEAHORSE 61
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