Opposite: one minute you see it (top) the next you don’t (below). It was quite amazing that nobody was hurt when a rigging terminal failure brought USA 17’s third and final soft rig crashing down. Russell Coutts’s decision to abandon development of the soft rigs and throw everything at the wing was a very risky call in a huge campaign… and in hindsight the smartest. The final massive 30ft foils and winglets (above) used in the match and a stark shot (top right) of the most important part of every big multihull… the beams (hulls are easy to replace). The hydraulics controlling USA 17 were driven by this lightweight BMW race car engine (right); the boat was such a challenge to prepare that the first time it ever completed a race distance without a technical failure was Race 1 of the Cup
off. Then Russell and Tom had to dash off to catch different planes at different air- ports. ‘Russell called me after hearing from Mike Drummond that they were doing figure-of-eights in the harbour,’ Ehman said. ‘I’d never heard him so excited.’ Scott Ferguson was onboard. ‘My heart
was in my throat,’ he says. ‘It was emo- tional for me. We’d worked so hard to get the wing designed and built. To go from inside the tent where we had done a little testing, then through the lifting procedure, to going sailing, taking it slowly, making sure everything worked as we expected it to work, was surreal. ‘As the day went on we loaded it up
more and more. Then Jimmy turned to me and said, Scotty, can we fly a hull? And I said, well, Jimmy, this is as good a time as any. It was quite a moment. ‘Coming in after that day I wasn’t quite
at the level of tears but I felt pretty proud that something like that could go sailing, and fly a hull for the first time, which is a big moment when it comes to loading…’ The trimmers had their own learning
curve. Today’s trimmers keep an eye on the instruments, but they also look at sail shape. The wingsail didn’t lend itself to that. The first day out everyone felt the boat
was way below potential. De Ridder, Joey Newton and Ross Halcrow met aero specialist Joseph Ozanne. ‘Joseph put a lot of time into the wing design and calculating the targets,’ de Ridder says. ‘So we started ignoring the feeling of whether it was right or wrong, and just trimmed it to the target numbers. From then on we learned to trust the targets, and we were good.’ Like anything innovative that’s right out of the box, the wingsail would still have its
breaking-in period, with the emphasis on breaking. On 13 November one of the pins that secured an aft flap element jumped out of its socket, causing damage. Brad Webb went aloft and popped it back into place. Note to design and build teams: longer pins needed. On 16 November the bottom of the lowest flap broke off where the traveller attached. The flap would need to be rebuilt and reinforced. But these were incidentals. Nothing serious. But there were serious off-the-boat
handling problems that put the wing in jeopardy and, as Tim Smyth said, put his stomach in his throat more than once. As predicted, logistics were a nightmare.
On 9 December the wing was lowered and disassembled for shipping. The flaps were packed in huge 7.5m by 7.5m boxes. The boxes had soft tops because they would be stored below deck on the ship. An unusu- ally massive rainstorm for San Diego dumped a load of water on each of the boxes that had been left outside, uncov- ered. The soft tops caved in on the con- tents, breaking frames and ruining the film covering on all but two of the 11 flaps. The first plan was to return the flaps to
Anacortes for repair, then fly them to Valencia so they would arrive at the same time as the ship and afford more sailing time. Smyth and Turner convinced the sail- ing team to ship them with the boat while they built replacement parts in Anacortes. They would repair the flaps in Spain. Three days later, while loading the main
element onto the ship, the wing caught a breeze and tried to fly. A strop broke, the main element dropped, frames were broken. It was an accident that could have spelled the end of the campaign.
One couldn’t help wondering where
Larry Ellison was when he heard the news. ‘They didn’t tell me,’ Ellison says with a chuckle. ‘At least not until it had been successfully repaired a few days later. ‘The wing can take a lot,’ Ellison says.
‘One horrible night in Valencia it gusted to 59kt. We had several boats out trying to keep the trimaran into the wind. But when you have a 23-storey wing there’s no such thing as heading into the wind. ‘Wind speeds are different at different
heights along the wing, and that moves the apparent wind angle. If you think you can stop the tri by heading into the wind I don’t think so. You’re thinking of the sailing you did the first 50 years of your life. This is different.’ ‘We couldn’t fix the wing before it
shipped,’ Tim Smyth says. ‘It was shrink- wrapped, and that process alone had taken two days. We just added those repairs to the list. Instead we got a Core Builders Invasion Force ready to embark for Spain. ‘We were 32 guys and a huge air-freight
box full of tools and parts. We stopped work on mast number 4 – the replacement for the smashed mast number 3 – and anyway we were out of resources! We had to build flap parts, and we needed people in Spain to work on the wing. Now we were definitely committed. No fall-back… ‘At this point it had become more like a
military campaign, constantly responding to crises. Actually, I still struggle to believe that somehow it all worked out as it did.’
Commissioned by Oracle Team USA, Learning to Fly was produced jointly by Cup historian Roger Vaughan and photographer Gilles Martin-Raget
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