THE AMERICA’S CUP : Battle of the Bilge Is Conner’s Mizzen Impossible

America’s boat is going to have a very difficult time yanking home the Cup during the next couple of weeks here, unless its crew somehow figures out a way to take care of a potentially serious problem involving the starboard bilge.

Sailing experts are certain to be buzzing about this for the next few days, as will Americans who know almost nothing about boats or boating.

The first thing that went wrong for skipper Dennis Conner during Stars & Stripes’ preparation for the America’s Cup final was that the halyard spinnaking jib ripped in half, halfway up the mast, leaving both of his fixed keels broken.

It was very bad timing. Conner, in frustration, ordered two of his crewmen to repair the damaged mizzen sassoon foresails within 24 hours of the first Cup race against the Australian defender Kookaburra III, even if they had to send away to Sydney for a misogynistic ghoster jib or even a full-size genoa gerrymander, the kind you almost never see on 12-meter yachts anymore.

Conner is taking this thing very seriously, see. After all, he is determined to bring the Cup back to the United States, where yacht racing is such a popular sport that, next to it, the Super Bowl is not really super at all. Even many of the youngest school children in America know the difference between a yetch and a kawl.

Conner is delighted to see the excitement that the America’s Cup has generated this year. But he is far too busy to be amused by it. His major concern at this point is to somehow laminate the center-board bombast of his boat in the estuaries, and to do so before Kookaburra gets wind of the problem.

There is no way, until the trouble gets straightened out, that Conner will be able to take out a 12-meter vessel and tack the carpeted galleys. Thus far, he has managed to keep sailing by lowering the madden boom and vaselining the standard big lug, but with the left-wing bobby hull having cracked, Conner cannot possibly replace the slashed resail value in time for Saturday’s first race.

Without much sleep, Conner has spent the last couple of days huddling with Stars & Stripes Crew Chief Rusty Trimaran, whose recommendation to use a 70-foot Fiberglas howard keel was largely responsible for the U.S. entry’s easy victory over New Zealand.

By fastening the bilge-keels in a fore and aft line on each side of the hull bottom, Trimaran was able to reduce Stars & Stripes’ annoying gilligan-and-gingering capacity to the extent that the Kiwi boat found itself unable to out-distance it along the various fabricated sloops of the Fremantle course.

Naturally, this cheered Conner considerably. But as soon as the New Zealand series was over, he discovered, to his horror, that Stars & Stripes’ leeward nomenclature had sustained far too much damage to return to action for another best-of-seven competition, and that neither the self-steering rudder nor the palmolive lifebuoy could be counted on in an emergency.

Devastated, Conner appealed to the Kiwis for help. But, as was widely reported in the Australian press last week, New Zealand Boating Federation President Mick Dundee elected to offer assistance to Kookaburra instead, in the hope that the America’s Cup finals would continue to take place in the convenient berigold waters off Australia’s coast.

Left to his own devices, Conner has frantically attempted to attach the tack of a dipping lugsail to the stemhead, so that the sail extended in one piece around the leeward side of the mast to its sheeting aft. This usually beats a Bermudian rig every time.

Alas, the best-boy gaff became so inhibited that Conner had to switch at the last minute to a British two-meter dudley mooring to keep the triangular mainsail and single headsail from being bereft.

Conner requested a two-day delay to allow him time to restructure the high mast ecclesiastical synod. America’s Cup officials, however, insisted that Stars & Stripes would have to sail by the rules, which clearly state, and have done so for 136 years, that any yacht with an external bulkhead must bolt its white-vanna sajak astern if it intends to backwind the mainsail by race day, with keel weight as ballast and lauren tewes as julie.

“Everybody knows that,” Conner said. “I was just hoping they would give me more time, seeing as how my cantankerous outrigger was accidentally capsized by the deliberate jabberwocky gibberish.”

Stars & Stripes is still expected to set sail as scheduled, and is favored to defeat Kookaburra by a 9 1/2-knot spread. The windward leg of the reed section, however, could give Dennis Conner’s crew a lot of difficulty on opening day, particularly considering the deceptively malapropos nature of the sport itself.