Stars & Stripes Lands in San Diego After Cross-Country Tour

What’s midnight blue and white, 75 feet long, 15 feet 6 inches wide and 13 feet 6 inches high? And how--or why?--does anyone move it from Bristol, R.I., to San Diego?

“It’s a sailboat,” Mick Harvey explained to curious onlookers along the way.

One Texas skeptic, judging that Harvey was looking for a launching ramp, considered this information as he drilled a lizard with his chewing tobacco and responded: “Well, it ain’t gonna fit in any lake around here.”

Merely passing through, pardner. This isn’t just any boat, and it’s not just another of maybe two dozen of the new International America’s Cup Class that will find the way to San Diego over the next few months by land, sea and air.

Some boats will arrive in time for the first IACC World Championships May 4-11, others for the challenge and defense trials next January. But none will rate the fanfare this one will receive, starting next Sunday with what PR firms call a “gala christening.”

It’s Dennis Conner’s boat, the newest generation of Stars & Stripes in all its promised glory and the first American-built IACC boat to hit the water.

The eight boats previously in port--one from France, two each from Italy and Japan and three from New Zealand--were brought by freighters. Italy, the Soviet Union and perhaps France plan to bring other boats by air.

None will sail across oceans under their own power. Nobody has done that since 1937, when T.O.M. Sopwith brought Endeavour II from Britain to lose to Harold Vanderbilt’s Ranger, 4-0, at the end of the J-Boat era.

Harvey and operations manager Bill Trenkle and their crews will be scrambling to put the boat together for its coming-out party Sunday. The 106-foot, 7 1/2-inch mast and the 30,000-pound keel, both fabricated in California, are arriving separately.

Harvey is Conner’s construction supervisor for the newest Stars & Stripes, which was built at Eric Goetz’s boatyard in Rhode Island. Bruce Nelson, David Pedrick and Alberto Calderon designed it, with Chris Todter coordinating their efforts. Goetz built it of space-age carbon-fiber material.

Conner won the America’s Cup back from Australia with Stars & Stripes ‘87, a 12-meter that is already a museum piece. In ‘88, he defended it against New Zealand’s aircraft carrier-like monohull with the Stars & Stripes catamaran, which tourists now joy-ride at Acapulco.

Conner scored his first Cup victory in 1980 as the skipper of Freedom, a blue boat like S&S; ’87 and the catamaran. Liberty, with which Conner lost the Cup to Australia in ‘83, was red.

There wasn’t much discussion about what color this boat wouldn’t be. A red boat has never won the America’s Cup--take note, Il Moro and Mercury Bay.

Harvey accompanied the new Stars & Stripes on its 3,500-mile journey. He is at home on the road.

Ask him where he lives and he will say he is from Port Lincoln, a small town in south central Australia near Adelaide, but has lived in the United States for 10 years while serving as captain of several maxi boat programs and acquiring an American wife, Cathy. The logistics of a maxi program are similar to an America’s Cup, so Conner hired Harvey to handle Stars & Stripes.

Mick and Cathy followed the boat out of Goetz’s yard at 8 a.m., EST, on March 19. It was transported facing backwards on one side, like a beached whale, on a World Marine Transport trailer, with escort vehicles front and rear.

California, here we come. Harvey hoped it would take six days; it took almost 7 1/2. They touched 14 states, with overnight stops in Harrisburg, Pa., and a couple of towns tourists miss if they blink--Atkins, Va., and Lebanon, Tenn.--then Texarkana, Tex.; El Paso, and Yuma, Ariz.

“The problem is that for oversize loads, every state has a different law,” Harvey said. “You can’t just go and say, ‘I want a permit to go from Bristol to San Diego.’ You have to deal with each state authority.

“We could only travel from sun-up to sunset in every state. There were times when we were still 20 miles from the truck stop when the sun was going down. But legally we were fine because we still had another half-hour of daylight.

“Arkansas, we didn’t go on an Interstate (highway) at all. We went on secondary roads. We traveled an extra 100 miles farther than what we had to. Frankly, I think it’s dangerous. You take up the whole road, traveling along at the speed limit--55 or 65 m.p.h., depending on the state--because you’ve got to get there.”

Nevertheless, the best day was winding through Arkansas: 660 miles. The worst day was the previous one, when they had to stop at 3 p.m. in Lebanon, Tenn., east of Nashville, after only 300 miles. “A lot of states have curfews for wide loads,” Harvey said. “You can’t travel through the big towns at rush hour from 3 to 7 in the afternoon (and evening). You’d clog the traffic up too much.”

Out of Bristol, they picked up Interstate 195 in Massachusetts, then headed southwest into Connecticut and New York on Interstate 95, and into Pennsylvania. After dipping into Maryland, they turned north to Wheeling, Pa., southwest through West Virginia, stopping for the night at Atkins, Va. (Pop. 500), the gateway to Hungry Mother State Park. Next, it was on to Knoxville, then via Interstate 40 through Nashville, followed by a series of side roads from Memphis through Arkansas.

“We didn’t have any close calls except on the secondary roads in Arkansas when we were running people off the road,” Harvey said.

“They just had to get out of our way.

“There was this one stretch across the swamps in Arkansas that was like a causeway, and it didn’t have any shoulders. So we were just trucking along, taking up two lanes. When people were coming the other way we had to get over as far as we could to the right, and they were like right on the edge, too.”

Leaving Arkansas, they took Interstate 30 from Texarkana to Ft. Worth, then Interstate 20 to Interstate 10 in southwest Texas, before switching to Interstate 8 at Casa Grande, Ariz., for the last leg to San Diego.

Other than a broken trailer axle and four flat tires, there were no serious glitches. They didn’t even get any tickets--unusual for such a large load, truckers told them.

Other than some rain squalls and thunderstorms through Arkansas, the weather was good--until they hit a snowstorm 15 miles east of San Diego.

Harvey thinks Stars & Stripes made friends, coast to coast. Conner’s fame seems to be nationwide.

“Some people you’d never think would know, like out in the middle of the Midwest, would say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about him. He’s going to go race for the American (sic) Cup.’ ”