S.D. Is Out, Long Beach or Hawaii In for Summer Defense of America’s Cup

Sail America confirmed Friday that it will defend the America’s Cup late next summer in a catamaran against the monohull of New Zealand’s Michael Fay, and that it would do so in Long Beach or Hawaii--not the home waters of San Diego, where the trophy now resides.

Fay, the Auckland merchant banker, had been in San Diego this week to discuss his challenge and reacted unhappily to the announcement. “We are now back in our respective corners,” he said.

Fay issued the challenge by invoking rights heretofore ignored in the 100-year-old Deed of Gift that governs Cup competition. Last July he told the San Diego Yacht Club he was challenging for the Cup 10 months hence in a boat with a 90-foot waterline, the maximum allowed.

When Fay’s challenge was upheld by the New York Supreme Court, San Diego responded by telling Fay it, too, would abide strictly by the deed, which it says allows the defender to pick the venue and its own boat.

Fay disputes those two points, but San Diego now seems committed on that course.

“We’re building two boats,” John Marshall, the design team manager, said. “They’re both multihulls. One is a catamaran (two hulls). The other we’re not committing yet.”

That leaves open the possibility that the other could be a trimaran (three hulls). They will be built in California.

“The last time we were dealing with 40,000 pounds of lead attached to an ugly blob of aluminum,” Marshall said, referring to the conventional 12-meter boats used since 1958. “(This time) we’re going to see boats on both sides that will establish levels of performance far beyond anything we’ve seen.”

Compared to a 12-meter, which occasionally reaches a top speed of 15 knots, Marshall believes both the New Zealand and Sail America boats will be capable of more than 30 knots.

San Diego’s hope is to dispose of Fay’s challenge this year, then stage an all-comers defense in 1991--in those old “ugly blobs.”

Sail America’s first boat will be called “Stars & Stripes,” as was the blue 12-meter Dennis Conner used to win the Cup back from the Australians at Fremantle last winter. Conner, despite limited multihull experience, also will be skipper of this boat.

The boat will be built “as light as we can possibly build it,” Marshall said. “We’ve got Dennis on a diet.”

Preliminary construction started this week.

Sail America has assembled an 18-man team headed by Marshall that includes six designers, three sailing consultants, six technical consultants and two meteorologists.

Designers Key People

The key people are the designers, especially multihull experts Dave Hubbard and Duncan Maclane of Connecticut, whose Class C catamarans have won the Little America’s Cup for multihulls five times, and Gino Morelli of Newport Beach, who designed the Formula 40 catamaran that Randy Smyth sailed to the 1986 world championship in Europe.

Smyth, the Huntington Beach sailmaker who in 1984 won an Olympic silver medal on a Tornado catamaran, also is on the team as a consultant, along with Cam Lewis and Peter Isler, who was Conner’s navigator at Fremantle.

One technical consultant is John Roncz, who designed the airfoils for the Voyager airplane, which Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew around the world non-stop without refueling, while Conner was trying to win back the Cup a year ago.

Roncz described the sailing concept as “standing an airplane wing on its end.”

The sails may be of a firm, fixed shape instead of conventional pliable material.

‘A Distant Third’

The meteorologists will help determine the venue, but Marshall said, “San Diego is starting a little bit of a distant third.

“The probability is it will be someplace else. We see two strong candidate race courses that are suitable for these very high performance boats and will allow both our boat and New Zealand’s to show their stuff.”

But especially Sail America’s boat, Marshall might have noted.

“One is Hawaii, a very windy, very challenging environment,” he continued. “The other is the (‘84) Olympics/Congressional Cup course off Long Beach. That’s more a medium-wind environment, but in the month of September, which is one of the lightest-wind months in San Diego, the Long Beach course would offer a point in between.

“The new boats are not going to get up and get flying until there’s a little breeze. Just to realize the potential in the boats, we do need some wind.”

Edge to Long Beach

Logistics give Long Beach the edge. The boats will be built in California of strong but light carbon fiber, drawing their components from various area suppliers.

Sail America design chief John Marshall admitted to a dilemma in the decision to go multihull. Having wasted 4 1/2 months fighting New Zealand’s Michael Fay in court, the team didn’t think it still had time to build a monohull to beat the one Bruce Farr--”arguably, the best boat designer in the business,” Marshall said--is building for New Zealand.

But while multihulls are basically faster on a straight-line reach (across the wind) than monohulls, committing to one puts Sail America at a double disadvantage: maneuverability on a closed course and the lack of a reaching leg on the 40-mile windward-leeward course specified by the deed for the first and third races of a best-of-three series.

The second race, on a triangular course, “would be a happier race for our boat,” Marshall said.

Computer projections based on basic information have given Sail America clues to how fast Fay’s boat--described as a high-performance planing hull--will be, but Marshall wouldn’t say specifically.

He did say, “We’re not going to go to 90 feet. We’re not gonna tell you exactly how big, but we know that the structural engineering and other considerations are so daunting in the time available that building an absolute maximum size boat would probably reduce our chances to win.”

Britton Chance, who returns to the design team, said he doubted that Fay would take Sail America to court over the catamaran issue.

“If he does go back to court, he runs the risk of running into ‘89, and that would give us plenty of time to build an adequate monohull,” Chance said.

Fay, with lawyer Andrew Johns and designer Bruce Farr, had several meetings this week with San Diego YC Defense Committee members Gerry Driscoll, Harry Usher, Gary Jobson and Marshall, who described the meetings as “very amiable,” if not productive.

Brian Bilbray, the San Diego County supervisor who heads the America’s Cup Task Force, said the group is agreeable to defending the Cup elsewhere against Fay if it “makes sure New Zealand is defeated so we can have our event in ’91.”

Shortly before boarding a plane in Los Angeles for his return flight home, Fay said, “I thought we had an agenda on the table during our negotiations this week. That agenda consisted of many items including timetable, type of boat, venue and number of races. We were ready to seriously discuss these issues including the possibility of extending the race to 1989. It was our understanding that we were to respond to these issues by Monday, which we were prepared to do. This action by Sail America disposes of the agenda. We are now back in our respective corners.”