TURMOIL AT SEA : Newport Beach’s Eagle Might Be Going Under Down Under in Wake of Mounting Problems

The wave of outraged patriotism that swept the United States after Australia made off with the America’s Cup in 1983 inspired six noble missions to reclaim it.

As the third round of challenger trials started this week, America II, fueled by the resources of the New York Yacht Club, and Sail America, driven by the obsession and organization of Dennis Conner, still were in position to head off New Zealand for the right to challenge the Australian defender for sport’s oldest trophy.

The others seemed headed for disappointment.

Among them, apparently, was the Newport Harbor Yacht Club’s Eagle Syndicate--officially, the first American group from outside New York ever to challenge for the Cup. It had launched its effort on the echoes of the Los Angeles Olympics.

There was Rod Davis, the skipper, who had won a gold medal as a crew in the Soling class.

There was Peter Ueberroth, the chairman of the board of trustees, whose leadership had created the most successful Olympic Games in history.

There was Dick Sargent, one of Ueberroth’s top Olympic lieutenants, who would serve as president and fund raiser.

There was even the same ocean venue off Long Beach to train upon.

The syndicate did not lack America’s Cup expertise, either. Gerry Driscoll, the director of operations, had sailed Intrepid well in the ’74 defender trials. Bill Ficker, the chief adviser, had defended the Cup with Intrepid in ’70. Johan Valentijn, the designer, had created four other 12-meters before Eagle, which he embellished with a splendid image of the indomitable bird on its hull.

But the organization kept unraveling. Davis’skill at the helm was undeniable, but it wasn’t enough. While he had sailed as a crewman in other America’s Cup efforts, critics noted that he had never commanded a 12-meter boat through a long campaign.

Ueberroth, moving on to become commissioner of baseball, was no more than a figurehead, offering the use of his name but little of his influence. No speeches. No hustling of potential sponsors.

Sargent came up short of funds. Eagle trained alone on the hallowed Olympic waters.

Arriving in Fremantle, then, without a strong fix on its potential, Eagle was jolted by a string of defeats that left it in ninth place after each of the first two rounds. It slipped to 10th Tuesday when it started the third round with a 5-minute 14-second loss to Britain’s White Crusader.

Some insiders have blamed the boat, others the crew. Hardly anyone blames both, and nobody seems to blame himself.

Driscoll quit last month when Davis and the board of directors balked at crew changes he recommended. Valentijn went home to Newport, R.I. He has since returned, hobbling on the left foot he broke jumping onto the tender one day.

Ficker, busy with his architectural firm, contributed important advice on organizing and operating a campaign but recently has not been a significant force in the operation, and Eagle apparently will not be the boat to make people forget that Valentijn also designed Liberty, which Conner sailed to defeat in ’83.

What went wrong?

Davis, enviously comparing his program to those with more money, said this week: “The place where it hurts you most is in backup gear. So far, we haven’t had a major breakdown, but if we did, it could be all over for us.”

He offered a solution to the fiscal disparity among syndicates, tongue in cheek: “They ought to figure money into the 12-meter formula. For every million, you gotta take off a foot of sail.”

But the lack of money was more a symptom of the problem, which was the lack of a strong organization at the start.

Eagle was an idea born in the brain of George Tooby, a Pasadena businessman with a long background in competitive sailing. Tooby, 73, proposed that his Newport Harbor Yacht Club organize a syndicate to get the Cup back.

Tooby became chairman of the Eagle syndicate board of directors and hired Valentijn to design a boat. He also engaged Francis Clauser, a Caltech engineer, as chief scientist to work with Valentijn in developing the latest technology.

Clauser, however, soon became dismayed at what he perceived to be a severe lack of scientific application to sailing, and he and Valentijn went separate ways.

Clauser wrote in the November issue of Caltech’s “Engineering & Science” magazine: “I am amazed at the great difference between the hyperbolic claims of ‘high-tech’ innovation that appear in the press and the design of the actual yachts now contending in the waters off Perth.”

The winged keel? Overrated, Clauser said. Its magic lay not in superior hydrodynamic properties but in the fact that the keel’s shape, with the lead concentrated at the bottom, permitted a lower center of gravity and therefore improved stability.

It’s interesting that Eagle started the trials with large, fat wings on its keel but, before the third round, switched to a surfboard-shaped appendage at the bottom.

More interesting, Clauser said this week that his son John, a physicist who races a one-ton class craft in San Francisco Bay, had a custom keel similar in principle to Eagle’s new keel put on his boat two years ago.

“He put a flattened torpedo on the bottom of the keel and, as a result, he has cleaned up in the Bay Area the last two seasons,” Clauser said.

Clauser said his son approached the St. Francis Yacht Club with the idea but was rejected. Even so, the St. Francis boat, USA, showed up here with a keel that looks like a flattened torpedo.

“I think St. Francis copied it from my son’s boat and Eagle copied it from St. Francis,” Clauser said.

Yet it hasn’t helped Eagle much in the third round. Does anyone have the right answer?

While Valentijn designed a rather conventional 12-meter, Clauser went farther than just an innovative keel. He proposed a far-out, totally radical 12-meter with a 10.4-foot underwater proboscis extension forward of its keel, underwater ailerons extending 35 feet to each side and pontoons above the water.

While conventional designers laughed, he tested one-third scale models in the ocean-simulator tank at Escondido and concluded that a 12-meter’s performance could be increased by “tens of percent,” not just the minuscule improvements designers normally seek.

Tooby was convinced, but that was last May. Eagle had already been launched, and time and money were short. The other board members turned down the idea.

“We planned to build two boats,” Tooby said this week. “Clauser joined our syndicate with the understanding we would build a second boat.”

Tooby resigned as chairman of the board, and at about the same time he and Clauser flew East to present the idea to the New York Yacht Club.

“(The two acts) weren’t connected, though,” Tooby said. “There were some things in my personal life that made it impossible to continue.”

And Tooby said he wasn’t disloyal to his club.

“I’m loyal to the Newport Habor Yacht Club,” he said. “But I’m also loyal to the United States.”

In any event, New York turned down the idea, too. It already had three new America IIs.

“We were always under-financed,” Tooby said. “I’m not an expert on raising money, but when I started this I felt there was money down there (in Orange County).”

None of the American syndicates had money, but at least a couple knew how to get it. Sargent resigned and was replaced by another Olympian, Gary Thomson, who had been Ueberroth’s commissioner of wrestling.

“Dick (Sargent) was unsuccessful in raising money,” Tooby said. “We wanted to bring in Gary Thomson, but he wouldn’t come as long as Dick was there, so Dick resigned so Gary could come aboard.”

Thomson found it a tough mine to work, too.

“Ours was the only syndicate that didn’t have one major single sponsor,” Tooby said.

The Irvine Company and Warmington Homes have donated about $500,000 each. All the rest is from lesser backers.

Tooby believes he won’t see another America’s Cup campaign.

“Not at my age,” he said. “It’s disappointing because I would like to see Eagle do better. I would have liked to build a second boat.”

Clauser’s boat.

“There were three things, really,” Clauser said. “The time and money, but also the same division of opinion as now exists in the Eagle syndicate.”

He hasn’t been approached by any other syndicates for the next campaign but would like to see what his boat could do.

“To be honest, yes,” he said. “You have to be careful of these crackpot theories that promise more than they can deliver . . . what the computer says or the theory says or the testing tank would say and what would come out if you built the boat.

“We’re pretty sure the one-third (scale) models are pretty much foolproof. The testing tank has an accuracy of (within) 1%, so when you have the very large differences (in performance) that we found in the testing tank, you don’t have much chance of a mistake there.”

According to John Griffith, an Eagle director, the syndicate has raised about 85% of its $8.5 million budget, but it is increasingly difficult to close the gap as losses mount. For a while, Eagle was a pay-as-you-go operation.

“We have some debts that are still owing, but we’ve made some real progress in the last few weeks,” Griffith said. “We have some loyal supporters.”

But other syndicates with lower budgets--Chicago’s Heart of America and San Francisco’s USA--are ahead of Eagle, raising the question of whether all of the money they had was wisely spent.

“If we were doing it again, we’d approach it differently,” Griffith said. “That doesn’t mean we did a lot wrong, but we had a lot of changes along the way.

“A lot of people didn’t think we’d have even one boat. We’ve come a long way. What’s going to happen tomorrow? I don’t think we’ve written off the boat or the keel yet.”