The multihull era


From J-boats to J-foils America’s Cup spar maker, engineer, aficionado and all round Cup enthusiast Eric Hall brings his latest Seahorse Cup trilogy up to date… for now


Grudge Match – 2010 For the second time in 20 years the America’s Cup Match resulted from a contentious court case that created a Deed of Gift contest between yachts of 90ft waterlines, racing a best two of three series. The politics, machinations and acri- mony leading up to that result are enough to write a book about and are beyond the scope of this article. But while Oracle were fighting the court


case the team were preparing for either eventuality: Alinghi’s proposed new 90ft America’s Cup Class monohull or a maxi- mum 90ft waterline boat for a Deed of Gift Challenge, which they decided early


38 SEAHORSE


on would be a trimaran. Team Oracle USA won the final round of court battles and plans for the giant trimaran were launched in earnest. The Defender Alinghi chose an equally giant catamaran. With a Deed of Gift Match there are no


rules other than waterline length, so the clean-sheet-of-paper story of the two boats is especially fascinating. It had all the aspects of a classic America’s Cup where the winner, repeating the history of earlier winners, took greater risks and made bigger changes closer to the Cup event than their adversary. For 2010 the Defender and Challenger


were going in distinctly different direc- tions. Oracle hired French multihull sailor Franck Cammas’s Groupama team to design the trimaran they’d decided upon. The design began as a development of the spectacular and nimble Orma 60 offshore trimarans. Displacement was to be about 17 tons with a 50m mast. The Swiss Alinghi team chose the oppo-


site direction. Noting Oracle’s heavy design orientation and using their experience with Ernesto Bertarelli’s light Lake Geneva cata- marans, Alinghi’s designers opted for a light, 12-ton displacement catamaran. Then came the taffy pull about the venue… The New York court set the date


of the event for February 2010 with a ‘default’ venue of Valencia. They then ordered Defender Alinghi to set their choice of venue no less than six months in advance of the Match. Alinghi chose the light-air waters of Ras al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. Oracle disagreed, saying Ras al-Khaimah was ‘not a Deed of Gift venue’. They wanted Valencia or a southern hemisphere venue. The court agreed with Oracle and stipulated the Match take place in Valencia. Valencia in February could bring any


kind of weather, light or heavy, so both teams had to cover all bets. The experi- enced French engineer/designers Hervé Deveaux and Stephen Robert did most of the initial conceptual work and later a lot of the detail engineering of Oracle’s hulls and rigs with substantial input from the VPLP office in Paris. Oracle’s USA 17 tri was basically a 90ft extension of VPLP’s well-developed Orma 60 concepts and was in its initial soft-sail form a distinctly off- shore-looking package. Meanwhile, the Alinghi team were


moving ahead with their catamaran pro- gramme which, as mentioned, was much more light-centric than Oracle’s. Whereas USA 17 displaced 17 tons Alinghi’s Alinghi 5 displaced just 12 tons.


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