Defiant Sails Past Conner for Victory : America’s Cup: In closest defender race yet, Melges wins by 50 seconds.

Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes, a midnight blue beauty with red, white and gold leaf trim, showed Wednesday she’s still fit to dance at the America’s Cup party--but, really, Dennis, those rags she’s wearing.

Her second-rate suit of sails appeared to be the only difference when Buddy Melges blew past her with America 3’s Defiant halfway through the defender trials race and went on to win by 50 seconds, the closest race of the first round.

The result left Defiant 5-0, with only its stablemate Jayhawk (0-4) to beat Saturday to complete a perfect round. Stars & Stripes (2-3) meets Jayhawk today.

Stronger winds of 9-11 knots were more in Stars & Stripes’ tempo, and she responded well when tactician Tom Whidden, calculating a wind shift, picked the right side of the race course. Conner nailed the start at that end of the line, with Melges satisfied to go the other way.

About seven minutes later, Stars & Stripes led Defiant into the anticipated shift that translated into a 35-second lead--about seven boat lengths--at the first windward mark.

But the new 22.6-nautical mile Cup course with its three reaching (across the wind) legs in the middle of three laps has brought new, sophisticated sail technology to the event. Competitors have spent the past year trying to figure out which sails work best on which of those legs--gennakers, spinnakers or someone’s grandmother’s bloomers.

That’s where America 3, with its inventory of more than 100 sails and many more days testing them on the water, has an edge over Stars & Stripes right now.

“The reaches speak for themselves,” Conner said. “The third reach, the wind went ahead and we had a spinnaker up and Buddy had the right sail up. He did a nice job of going over the top of us.”

Stars & Stripes tried ‘em all--sails boosting Bank of America, Pepsi and Cadillac. The sponsors must have been happy but they didn’t make the boat go fast enough.

For a while Defiant flew a small staysail under its billowing gennaker. Conner doesn’t even own a staysail.

Conner tried to keep Defiant from passing by luffing his boat up into the wind, forcing Melges to also head up.

Defiant protested that Conner wasn’t far enough ahead to do that.

Tactician Dave Dellenbaugh said, “We thought maybe they kept luffing a little bit after it was obvious they didn’t have luffing rights. But it was the right call by the umpires.”

Stars & Stripes protested Defiant’s protest.

Whidden said, “We thought maybe their mast abeam call was a little early, and once they call mast abeam we must curtail our luff, and if we don’t like it our only recourse is to put the protest flag up.”

The umpires waved their green flag to nullify both protests, but the incident created an historical footnote: the first ruling by on-the-water umpires in the America’s Cup, avoiding a tedious late-night protest hearing.

At the same time Conner’s navigator, Lexi Gahagan, was trying to poke some kelp off the rudder with a stick, but Conner said that wasn’t a serious problem.

“That leg in the northerly wind direction takes you close to the kelp beds and we got a pretty good size dose of it,” Conner said.

“But I doubt that any of the difference you saw there was because of the kelp. It was just an annoyance that it came at a particularly inconvenient time with Buddy attacking us while we were trying to get the darn stuff off.

“There weren’t any problems out there that couldn’t be solved . . . an upgrade in our sail inventory, a little more crew practice.”

At least Conner seemed to be trying, after an earlier suggestion otherwise.

“The first part of the race today I felt like the Dennis of old,” he said. “Then something happened to me and I turned into a possum.