Eagle Loses by 27 Seconds, but Heart of America Wins

French Kiss held back a relentless Eagle assault Monday for a 27-second victory, and Heart of America trounced luckless Challenge France by 1:44 in the America’s Cup challenger series.

The New Zealanders in their “plastic fantastic,” as they call the first 12-meter made of fiberglass, eased to a 1-minute 49-second win over Italia.

With the matches delayed for an hour by scant 2-knot winds, both Indian Ocean courses were shortened from eight legs, at 24.5 miles, to six stretches at 18 miles.

While the light and shifty breezes increased to 12 to 15 knots over calm seas, Dennis Conner, the skipper who suffered the ignominy of losing the trophy three years ago, clinched his second Stars & Stripes win with a 3:19 drubbing of Italy’s Azzurra.

Conner was scheduled to sail against Eagle today.

Great Britain’s White Crusader warded off a persistent Canada II assault, winning by 1:18. That was the Royal Thames Yacht Club crew’s second win and the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron’s second loss.

The biggest loser, 8:04 behind at the finish, was Courageous IV of the Yale Corinthian Yacht Club, a 12-year-old yacht rekeeled three times. It was beaten by Tom Blackaller’s radical U.S.A., representing the St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco.

French Kiss, skippered by Marc Pajot, took the lead at the start, but Eagle, of the Newport Harbor Yacht Club, tacked past on the first leg to windward, rounding the mark 23 seconds ahead.

But Olympic champion Rod Davis’ lead was brief. When the breeze shifted 30 degrees, the Frenchmen were in position to take the lead and stretched an 11-second edge rounding the third mark to 22 seconds on the fourth. They dropped the spinnaker in the water, however, to lose 12 seconds on the first reach, a crosswind leg.

Pajot added another 16 seconds to his edge on the second reach and 7 more heading home.

Observers counted more than 90 tacks on the three upwind legs as Eagle tried to force the French into an error. Davis, who tacked 41 times on one windward leg, said: “We did a lot of tacking, which kept the race close, but the French were going better downwind.”