AMERICA’S CUP : Old-Time Help for High-Tech Sailing

Despite having the best cloak-and-dagger research and nautical technology money can buy, Bill Koch says: “We’re still very worried about Dennis (Conner) and very humble about Dennis.”

So sailing into today’s best-of-13 America’s Cup defender finals, Koch is pulling out all the stops. His newest weapons: The Farmer’s Almanac and pep talks.

“I’m going to pull out The Farmer’s Almanac, because the weather forecasting is only 50% better,” Koch said Friday.

The forecasting is critical because the boats--Koch has chosen to sail his third boat, America 3, against Conner’s Stars & Stripes--are configured for such narrow weather ranges that one or two knots of wind can make a few boat lengths’ difference around the 20-mile course.

For example, the America 3 team believes that Stars & Stripes is vulnerable below five knots and at more than 7 1/2.

The problem is that nobody can special-order wind.

Stars & Stripes tactician Tom Whidden said: “We’re expecting a fairly breezy day tomorrow (not good for Stars & Stripes) and then tapering a little bit into the week, but I haven’t looked much past about four days.”

Koch said: “We’ve been looking at the historical averages. We’ve done everything we can to improve our boat in the time period we’ve had (since last Monday’s sail-off between Stars & Stripes and Koch’s other boat, Kanza), and we think we’ve optimized it for this light-air window that’s out there. We’ve tried not to give up any heavier air performance. We’re extremely, cautiously optimistic.”

But to make sure, Koch added: “We’ve gone back and analyzed every race we lost to Dennis, and we had some pretty tough (talks) about how to improve our performance and our afterguard and not make mistakes on the race course.

“One of the things we noticed was that Dennis has the best odds of beating us when the start is in light air. So we said if we want to optimize our chances of winning, we’ve got to improve our light-air performance.”

Before Koch selected America 3 Thursday, Conner and his team had spent the last few days saying what a terrific boat Kanza was--despite Stars & Stripes’ 3-8 record against America 3 and a 3-2 record against Kanza.

Koch didn’t buy it. America 3 has been a good all-round boat, but Koch still couldn’t resist tweaking it some more this week, while Conner did what he could with his year-old Stars & Stripes.

“The same changes that Bill did,” Conner quipped. “Worked on our mast, weight in the ends (of the boat), lowered the weight in the (keel) bulb--all the common-sense things that make a boat go fast.”

Koch will continue development and testing on Kanza, his fourth boat, bringing Defiant, his second boat, out of mothballs as a trial horse. If America 3 wins the defender finals, Koch will have the option of switching back to Kanza for the America’s Cup match starting May 9.

If Conner wins, it doesn’t matter, and Koch--after virtually dismissing Conner as a threat only a few weeks ago--now expresses more respect.

“Dennis has the fire in his belly and the killer instinct,” Koch said. “But he’s a sportsman out there, and we appreciate that.”