Eagle Interests Are Pleased With the Yacht’s Showing

Among American challengers for the America’s Cup, Dennis Conner’s Sail America syndicate and America II from New York have built three new boats each, trying to achieve the ultimate design, and the Golden Gate syndicate has built two.

Eagle is the Newport Harbor Yacht Club’s lone 12-meter boat, and skipper Rod Davis is happy with it.

Eagle, like most of the syndicates, is struggling for money, but Davis didn’t sound as if he was rationalizing when he said: “Building a lot of boats, to me, particularly at this point in the program, is crazy. It’s taken us a month and a half just to sort Eagle out. You run out of time so quickly that I would rather continue to refine this one than interject another boat.”

Conner, in addition to his three new boats, has been sailing in Hawaii with Liberty, his ’83 defender, and a modified Spirit of America.

“Dennis has five boats over there,” Davis said. “That’s like going on a date with five women. You get all confused. You don’t know what to do.”

Conner, however, maintains that sailing the other boats against the unaltered Liberty has given him a clear picture of how well the new ones are performing.

“We’ve at least caught up with the Aussies,” he said at one point.

But Davis thinks he has a good line on Eagle after sailing it off Long Beach for the last few weeks against Magic, which he had sailed against another old campaigner, Victory ‘83, in competitive testing with Italy’s Italia syndicate last year.

“We got to sail Magic against Victory, and we know how this boat (Eagle) is going against Magic,” Davis said.

But when they began to get Eagle sorted out, it was so much faster than Magic that the latter was no longer useful as a pace boat and had to be beefed up beyond the 12-meter rating.

“We’ve had to make Magic a little bigger than a 12-meter, with a little too much sail, a little too much lead (in the keel),” Davis said. “We’ve set it up so now she pushes Eagle through the whole range (of wind and water conditions). But we couldn’t take her to the America’s Cup the way she is. She doesn’t rate in.

“Now Magic’s about the same speed as Eagle in her overgrown state, which is perfect for what we want to do. We have to keep pushing Eagle along.

“We’ll get another month and a half out of that boat, and after that all the winches will go to Australia with Eagle and the boat will be cut up for Coke cans or something.”

Figuring that there are about six tons of aluminum in the average 12-meter, each of the ’86 discards should be good for more than 300,000 cans. Eagle, Davis is confident, won’t be one of them.

“We have little bugs we have to work out, as with any boat, but so far we’re real happy with the design and the sailing characteristics,” he said.

America’s Cup Notes In Eagle’s test sailing off Long Beach, tactician Doug Rastello, sail maker Lowell North and Dick Deaver have been alternating at Magic’s helm. Azzurra, the other Italian syndicate, is due to arrive in late June to sail Magic against Eagle. . . . Peter Isler of Marina del Rey, the skipper of Courageous, has won two major match racing series: April’s Citizen’s Cup at New Zealand and last month’s Royal Lymington Cup at England. . . . Stars and Stripes has signed what it calls a multimillion-dollar sponsorship agreement with Anheuser-Busch. The brewery, which plans a national advertising and merchandising awareness campaign, will film a commercial in Hawaii. The aim is to raise $500,000 through public contributions. That would help pay for the syndicate’s third new boat, which is due in July. . . . Gary Jobson, tactician in three previous Cup campaigns, has resigned from that role behind Buddy Melges on Heart of America to be ESPN’s expert analyst for its America’s Cup coverage starting next month. Jobson, the defending champion, is the only American skipper entered in the Liberty Cup June 18-22 in New York Harbor. Foreign entries include America’s Cup skippers Colin Beashel, Australia; Chris Dickson, New Zealand; Harold Cudmore, Britain; Lorenzo Bortolotti, Azzurra, and Terry Neilson, Canada. . . . The St. Francis Yacht Club has boosted Golden Gate’s fund-raising by assessing its 1,331 members $360 each. . . . Heart of America tested its new boat off Newport, R.I., then towed it through Chicago for formal christening en route to San Francisco for a second series of sailing with Golden Gate and Canada.