The America’s Cup : Two Superbly Built Vessels Figure to Sail Into Oblivion Today

Some romantics regard a sailboat as the purest of technological art forms--a machine built to function as one with nature.

Sad to say, two fine sailing machines will cruise into the sunset today, obsolete in their prime.

Boats like these were never meant to meet.

The Stars & Stripes catamaran, an eased-up winner over New Zealand’s 133-foot monohull on a 40-mile windward-leeward course Wednesday, should win this best-of-three America’s Cup defense with even greater ease over a 39-mile triangular course more favorable to its design.

After today, they will have fulfilled their misguided purposes, and other, more conventional craft will soon be built to take their places.

“Not a lot of buyers for it,” Randy Smyth said Thursday, regarding the blue-hulled, 60-foot Stars & Stripes cat with the 108-foot-tall airfoil wing sail.

“You can’t run it in an ocean race. It wouldn’t be a Fremantle machine. It wouldn’t be a Transpac machine. It wouldn’t race the French across the Atlantic, no way.

“It’s a very specialized machine, very good for what it was built for.”

What it was built for, Smyth added, was basic: “Boring course, boring venue. They couldn’t have chosen a worse course. Maybe it was exciting in the 1800s when the Deed of Gift was written.”

Smyth knows as much about sailing catamarans as anybody in the world. An Olympic silver medalist on a Tornado cat in 1984, European Formula 40 series champion in ’86 and winner of too many other titles to list, he was recruited early on by Stars & Stripes for his expertise.

By the preplanned rotating crew system, Smyth was not on the boat Wednesday--except for the victory ride home--but will be aboard today, tending to the wing sail, while Dennis Conner steers.

Michael Fay has said this is a mismatch and, at least in one sense, even the Stars & Stripes people now concede that he is correct. With their different sailing characteristics, a monohull and a catamaran are terribly mismatched, as would be Indy cars against dragsters.

That, Smyth said, would explain some of the odd points that New Zealand’s people attributed to deliberately poor sailing by Conner Wednesday.

“There were a couple of factors,” said Smyth, who watched the races both from the water and on television. “There were some pretty big wind shifts out there. It looked like the Kiwis actually missed a few big shifts, which would throw them back on the beat (upwind leg).

“But what you saw was the catamaran mimicking the angles of the monohull. Given an open race course to set a speed record, it would have been sailed differently. The catamaran was pinching--sailing very high, a controlling move.

“Twenty minutes before the start they called back here on the radio to get a weather update and the wind at the start was 165 (compass degrees), 170 (east of due south), but the winds offshore were way to the right--230 and aloft 270 (due west). What you saw was a reaction of a match-race mentality to that information.”

Normally, Smyth meant, a catamaran would sail a beat with minimum tacks, sailing far to one side of the course and back before rounding the mark. But in a wide wind shift, it could sail itself out of the race if caught on the wrong side of the course.

So, Conner stayed on top of the Kiwis, and that required slowing the boat down.

“What you saw was sailing a course a catamaran doesn’t thrive on, which is pinching,” Smyth said. “It cuts its speed, but it also cuts its risks.”

The Kiwis also accused Conner of using very small headsails and not “flying” one hull for maximum performance.

“When the wing is in its prime, it doesn’t have any headsails upwind,” Smyth said. “It’s very overpowered. You don’t want big headsails.

“And when you get stuck sailing a monohull angle and a monohull tactic, which is what the leader has to do in a match race, all of a sudden it looks like the boat is way underpowered, which it was, because it’s going slow.”

And the slower it goes, the more difficult it is to fly a hull.

“It makes it look bad,” Smyth said. “But if you keep it in the perspective of trying to win a race and consider the factor of the possible big wind shift, you’re looking at real major potentials for disaster.

“From this side of the fence, we’re trying to hang onto a little silver cup, at any cost.”

Two of today’s three legs will be reaches--sailing across the wind--and Smyth expects the cat to stretch her legs.

“When you’re just going to go from buoy to buoy, where the shifts won’t make any difference, that’s our favorite (point of sail),” he said.

“If we have a weird situation as we did yesterday with the huge potential wind shift, you might see the same funky tactics on the beat. But, no question, once you get around that first mark, it’s going to be a boat speed contest. You’re going to see some faster speeds.”

How fast will the cat go today?

“Just double the wind speed,” Smyth said.

It’s evident now that the 60-foot catamaran was overkill, but Smyth said he isn’t sure a conventional cat could have whipped the New Zealand boat.

One possibility was Rudy Choy’s 62-foot Aikane X-5 that has won the Newport Beach-to-Ensenada race the last two years.

Or, Smyth said, “They could have taken a Formula 40 with a transom extension. Add four feet to the waterline and you’d be (within the Deed of Gift specifications).

“But you have to put this in perspective that all the decisions were made in December, four months before the Kiwis launched,” he said. “We had no idea what we were up against. We were just trying to build the ultimate. It’s the ultimate in a catamaran for this race course and this venue.

“I don’t think Aikane would be a shoo-in against the monohull in light air, not on Wednesday’s course. Rudy Choy said in our design meetings, ‘You’re not going to beat ‘em in light air with a catamaran.’ He didn’t think we could do it. And it’s not that easy.”

According to Smyth, the soft-rigged Stars & Stripes backup boat may be the second-fastest cat on the coast.

“The soft rig is so close you can’t discern a difference,” he said. “The wing rig won 10 of 11 races, but a lot of those races were like 20 seconds or a boat length--incredibly close. That one’s faster in a chop, this one’s faster in smooth. This one’s faster in light, that one’s faster in medium.”

Considering a mixture of chop and light air, Smyth said, Wednesday’s race would have been a tossup.

That may be the catamarans’ only future: racing each other. Anybody want to buy a cat?