have left earlier but everyone kept pausing to look up and gawk, like country bump- kins visiting Manhattan for the first time. Having a 200ft conventional carbon


mast towering above them had taken some getting used to. Looking up at a wing taller than the wingspan of a 747 perched on the slim main hull of a light 115ft multihull was unnerving. ‘The most awe-inspiring part was when we stood it up that first morning,’ Ian Burns says. ‘It was so massive. It didn’t look like it was meant to live on the ocean. It was like some piece of land- based architecture.’ Gilles Martin-Raget photographed


Mike Drummond was optimistic. He’d acquired an A-Class cat with a wingsail to get Spithill and others up to speed. From that experience he knew the team wouldn’t need a month of training to fine-tune the wing. Once the aerodynamic design was set the wing would be set, as long as the mechanisms worked. ‘I thought if we had six weeks of sailing before the Cup that would be enough,’ Drummond says. ‘And that turned out to be about what we had.’ But first they had to get the wing on the


boat. That process began at 4:30am the morning of 10 November 2009. Fifty people wheeled the enormous thing out of the tent and down to the water. Without the 8m extension it was still 223ft long, 25 yards shorter than a football field. Dave Hubbard drew a system for raising and lowering the wing and Paul Bieker then


62 SEAHORSE


engineered it. A crane lifted the wing then its base was attached to the mast step. A hoisting line was run from high up on the wing to the end of a long strut (a ‘gin pole’) and back to a primary winch onboard. The strut pivoted on the mast step with a removable gimbaled bracket with preven- ter lines rigged to stabilise the wing. Even- tually the crew got familiar enough with the system to be able to raise or lower the wing in an hour and a half. The first morn- ing it took more like eight hours. Once it was up, the many builders who


had stayed to help with the raising of the wing quickly headed for the airport. Mast 4 had been ordered. ‘We had to at least start it,’ Tim Smyth says. ‘Though if the wing wasn’t any good we were done.’ USA 17 left the dock under tow at around 2pm that first day. They could


that memorable morning. ‘Most interest- ing about that moment when the wing went up,’ Martin-Raget says, ‘was that even if the designers and engineers were saying it should be OK no one was sure because no one had ever done it before. The fact the boat went sailing that same day was totally amazing. It was the best day of the whole adventure, for me, emo- tionally, even stronger than the day we won the Cup.’ After a minute or so under tow USA 17


was obviously sailing so they cast off. The rig felt so right that it wasn’t long before the crew were doing manoeuvres in crowded San Diego Harbor, tacking and gybing, doing figure-of-eights at 20kt, things they wouldn’t have dreamt of doing with the soft sail rig. ‘Sailing with the wing was… instantaneous!’ Spithill says. ‘It was like sailing a small boat. It was awesome, one of the best days we’d had.’ Tom Ehman and Russell Coutts were in


New York that day working on the legal case. They watched over a San Diego web- cam as the wing went up and the crew cast


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