THE OUTDOORS : Trial, Tribulation of Stars & Stripes Catamaran : Conner to Test It at Sea; Judge to Decide If It’s Allowed in America’s Cup Race

John Marshall, squinting skyward, walked into the Stars & Stripes compound on San Diego Bay Tuesday and exclaimed, “It’s overwhelming!”

Dennis Conner said: “It’s hard not to have chills up your spine.”

With a couple of hundred reporters in attendance, the chief designer and the skipper of the world’s highest-tech catamaran got their first looks at the fully assembled one-of-a-kind creation that was built to repulse New Zealand’s wildcat bid for the America’s Cup in September.

New York Supreme Court Judge Carmen Ciparick will decide sometime after a hearing today whether it will be permitted to sail against Michael Fay’s monstrous monohull. Conner is scheduled to sail it in its first sea trial today, moderate wind permitting.

Its hulls--gunsmoke blue in the spirit of the Stars & Stripes ’87 12-meter that won the Cup off Fremantle, Australia, 16 months ago--are 60 feet long and set 30 feet apart.

Those dimensions, however, will be dwarfed by week’s end, when Fay’s 124-foot boat with its 170-foot mast moves into its barge compound nearby. The boat is scheduled to arrive in San Pedro aboard a freighter Thursday morning and be transferred to a barge for immediate shipment to San Diego.

But the unique feature of the new Stars & Stripes is its hard, airfoil wing-type sail that has 1,300 square feet and is 90 feet high.

Because the sails can’t be lowered, the big cat must be laid over on its side when it isn’t sailing to keep it from blowing away. That’s how it was when the crowd arrived for the gala unveiling.

It was even impressive with one hull 30 feet in the air, before a crane flipped it upright. With the net trampoline stretched between the hulls aft of the mast, somebody suggested it looked like “a batting cage.”

A $3-million batting cage. That may be all it’s good for if Ciparick agrees with Fay that this isn’t what George L. Schuyler had in mind when he wrote the America’s Cup Deed of Gift 101 years ago.

Further, even if Ciparick denies Fay’s petition, Stars & Stripes still may decide to defend with a second catamaran that is identical except for a conventional soft-sail rig.

Even design team member David Hubbard, an MIT graduate who is an expert on the winged but much smaller 25-foot C-class catamarans, has reservations.

“There’s a certain amount of risk going to a rig like this,” Hubbard said. “So, we want to keep our options open right to the end on which (rig) we would use in the defense.”

Marshall concurred: “There’s no guarantee this is going to work.”

The second catamaran will be ready early in June, and the boats will be tested against one another.

Conner said, “I’m going to start with the soft rig and let the technicians check out the hard rig. If I break the mast, it’s not the end of the world. If I break the wing . . .

“The jury’s still out in my mind. I hear the technicians saying one thing, but common sense is telling me something else. The hard wing weighs like 500 pounds more than the soft rig. I’m worried about the pitching out there in light air, all that little chop. It might work well in the (computer test) tank, but show me.”

Hubbard said that the three-part wing sail “is based on airplane theory, but it has all the features of a conventional soft rig--a mast and flaps that can be shaped to camber and twist.”

Hubbard added that the soft rig should be faster in very light and strong wind, but the wing should be faster in the 8 to 12 knots of breeze anticipated.

Stars & Stripes has been using two Formula 40 catamarans for practice. Pierre LaMaout, a French catamaran expert, usually sails the boat opposite Conner.

The team also has Hubbard’s winged C-class cat, Patient Lady, for practice. Conner called it “a nice little toy.”

The general opinion is that any catamaran is a lock against a lead-ballasted monohull, but Conner remains somewhat nervous.

“It’s my job to be nervous,” he said. “How many winners do you know that don’t think they’re underdogs? The ones that are fat and happy are vulnerable.

“It’s easy for all these people to sit in their living rooms and say a catamaran’s faster than a monohull. How many of them have ever had to go out and race a 130-foot monohull with a mast 200 feet above the bottom of the keel? If they had to do it, they wouldn’t be quite so cocky.”

A few weeks ago, Stars & Stripes modified the F-40s by narrowing the beams from 24 1/2 to 18 feet and raising the masts 18 feet to make them more sensitive, as they expect the big boat will be. In one of the first trials, Conner capsized a few hundred yards from the dock.

“I’ve been upside down 50% of the time the last two weeks, so I’m not confident I can even get around the race course,” Conner said.

“Catamarans have to be very light and they’re notorious for breakdowns. I’d like to suggest that most of the people who say this will be a mismatch don’t know what they’re talking about. No one knows.”

Conner is adjusting to a different feel at the helm.

“A 12-meter is like driving a truck,” he said. “(It’s) a heavy displacement boat with a lot of momentum and a very fine groove (an optimum course relative to the wind).

“The biggest single difference I’ve found is that in (catamarans) you have to follow the wind much more. If you get a little puff of wind, you can’t dilly-dally in heading upwind or you’ll be upside down. If you get a puff downwind and the boat takes off, you have to bear off sometimes as much as 20, 25 degrees, and you’d better do it pronto-quicko.

“This boat weighs a 10th of what our 12-meter weighed. It will have a much lighter feel and be much more responsive, much quicker to accelerate, much quicker to decelerate.”

And Hubbard said: “If you’re too concerned about safety, you make the boat slow.”

Conner is reshaping more than his thinking. When he won his Star titles in 1971 and ‘77, he was notorious for putting on weight for extra ballast, and it wasn’t easy cutting back on the groceries afterward.

Now, it’s important to keep the catamaran as light as possible. The potbelly is gone.

“I’m trying,” Conner said. “I weighed 185 pounds in high school. I haven’t seen that for a long time.”

But he has lost nearly 50 pounds and is down to about 200--inspired, according to a report, by an agreement with a supplier of the boat’s carbon fiber filament to receive a free pound of the material worth about $1,000 for every pound he drops.

“That’s not true,” Conner said. “It would make me more motivated, though.”

Were the Kiwis trying to fatten up their rivals when they had them over to their Coronado apartments for a barbecue recently?

Conner didn’t go but said, “The sailors are a lot more friendly (than the syndicate leaders). I had a drink with them at the Chart House the other night. I’ve left the political and legal battling to the people who know best. The sailors get along.”

With one possible exception. Rod Davis, who skippered the Newport Harbor Yacht Club’s ill-fated Eagle at Fremantle, grew up around San Diego but his wife, Liz, is a Kiwi. Davis is the New Zealand crew chief, although residency rules will prohibit him from sailing on the boat.

“Benedict Davis?” Conner said. “Two years ago, he was waving his American flag. Now he’s waving his New Zealand flag. Did he change blood, or did a little green stuff change it for him?”

One day soon, the new boats will encounter each other, practicing off Point Loma.

“Can’t help but be a little curious,” Conner said. “You kind of eye each other, like two dogs around a fire hydrant.

“(Their boat is) very impressive. I asked ‘em if they would take me for a ride--after the event. They said they would. Can’t wait. They wouldn’t take me before, and I wouldn’t ask. It might psych me out.”

And what will happen if Ciparick rules against the catamaran?

Sail America executive Tom Ehman said: “If the judge rules against us, she’ll have to give us some time (to build another boat). Otherwise, we’ll have to hand over the Cup.”

Said Conner: “Conjecture. I’m not going to worry about it. Does she tell you you have to race in two months? Does she give you nine months? Two years? That’s not productive for me. I have to focus on it as if the race is in September.

“If we win, it’s ‘Our catamaran beat his 130-footer,’ and if we lose, ‘Dennis lost the America’s Cup again.’ Does that sound like a no-win deal?”