AMERICA’S CUP UPDATE : NOTEBOOK : New Zealand Rotates Afterguard

There were some key crew changes in Monday’s challenger races.

For its 4:55 victory over Espana ‘92, New Zealand showed the first shuffle in its afterguard, with trial horse helmsman Russell Coutts moving onto the main boat for the first time as tactician for skipper Rod Davis. Regular tactician David Barnes tended to the running backstays.

Coutts and Barnes had been rivals to steer the boat before Davis won the job.

Syndicate general manager Peter Blake also was aboard for the first time as the 17th, non-contributing crewman, but team spokesman Alan Sefton cautioned against reading anything significant into the assignments, which he described as part of the “routine afterguard rotation” to prepare for possible illness.

Davis said, “It would be foolish in a multi-million-dollar campaign to rely on one or two people.”

Coutts, asked if he still aspired to be skipper, said, “It doesn’t really matter if I have any aspirations at the moment.”

A day earlier Davis let Barnes drive the last two legs in a 12:12 victory over Spirit of Australia, while he sat on the stern rail and chatted with the 17th man--Bruce Farr, the boat’s designer.

Il Moro di Venezia had a new navigator--American Robert Hopkins in place of Enrico Chieffi, who, according to an Italian press release, was elsewhere on the boat “watching for the wind conditions and coordinating the crew work.”

Hopkins is the syndicate’s technical director who worked for Stars & Stripes at Fremantle in 1986-87.

Skipper Paul Cayard said, “Today is the first time we tried it, and we liked it. We’ll probably go with for awhile.

“Enrico Chieffi is probably the best sailor we’ve got and we wanted to get him up in the crew (where) he’s thinking about what sails (to use), takedowns, maneuvers. Basically, we’ve got a smarter boat.

“Robert can do the navigation. In fact, he wrote all the software (programs).”

Monday’s race between Ville de Paris and Il Moro had everything--even a whale.

As the French led the Italians up the first, windward leg, an overhead TV shot from a helicopter showed a California gray whale on a collision course with Ville de Paris.

When they were about four lengths apart--boat lengths, not whale lengths--the whale changed course in a thrashing of water, spouted his protest and swam off in another direction.

A rare doubleheader and two of the shortest courses in modern America’s Cup times--8.0 and 13.2 nautical miles--will be sailed today when America 3’s two boats race off Point Loma.

The races will conclude the second round of the defender trials. One of the races was rescheduled to make up for last Wednesday’s postponement because of the storm.

The normal courses for the current trials are 22.6 miles for the defenders and 20.03 for the challengers, each with three windward legs, three reaches and two downwind legs.

America 3 and Defiant will race the shorter course first--a simple windward-leeward, twice around. The longer course also is two laps but with three reaches on the first lap.

Village Defi Francais--the French team’s new America’s Cup Village at the entrance to Mission Bay--features a large viewing deck, a souvenir shop and a look at what they hope is the future.

In the entrance lobby there’s a 6x8-foot town model sent by the city of Sete on the south coast of France where they plan to defend the Cup in 1995. It even shows locations of the syndicate compounds.

The French also are building a bocci court along the water, turning up the heat on their rivalry with the Italians.

“We’ll invite them over to play,” said media liaison Gerard Boyer.

Boaters with TV sets on board can receive closed-circuit telecasts of the races through subscriptions to TeleVu, a division of Sunset Communications in San Diego.

Installation of a special antenna and a down converter is required. Details: (619) 293-7990.