AMERICA’S CUP UPDATE : NOTEBOOK : Stars & Stripes Headed to New York

Stars & Stripes was fast, if not the fastest, and she was always the prettiest and best-loved.

Too bad America 3 was painted plain white and christened so mathematically impersonally.

Who will note when she--it--leaves town?

But tears may fill the streets when Dennis Conner’s midnight-blue beauty heads out Harbor Drive on a truck next week, as soon as the holiday traffic clears.

Conner’s one and only is due by the second week in June at the North Cove Yacht Harbor in Manhattan, where it will be used as a kiddie ride for sponsors Conner is hustling to back his Whitbread Round-the-World Race effort in 1993-94 and his next America’s Cup campaign in 1995.

For those who’d like to get the real feel of the Hudson River, he’s also taking the soft-sail catamaran.

Stars & Stripes will be repainted and spruced up at grinder Rives Potts’ Pilot’s Point Marina in Westbrook, Conn., then sail in the Tall Ships parades in New York Harbor on July 4 and Boston a week later, perhaps stopping en route at Newport, R.I., to show the folks what a new America’s Cup boat looks like.

Bill Trenkle, Conner’s operations manager and port sail trimmer, will follow the boat to New York, where he also will be involved in the Whitbread planning.

“He keeps asking me what legs I want to do,” Trenkle said. “I’m sure it’s plenty of fun to sail on deck on one of those, but living below decks for 30 days at a time, I don’t know.

“I’m interested in doing the Southern Ocean leg. The Whitbread is an adventure race, and that’s the adventure leg.”

The best cure for the blues of losing the America’s Cup or any other major event? Go sailing.

“I learned that from Bill Buchan in ‘84,” says Steve Erickson, an Il Moro di Venezia coach who crewed on Buchan’s Star boat when they won an Olympic gold medal at Long Beach. “Bill had made plans to go right back to Seattle and sail in the Swiftsure race the following week, and I wondered, ‘Gee, didn’t he think we’d be in the Olympics?’ ”

Erickson will go with Il Moro skipper Paul Cayard to sail in a 50-footers regatta at St. Tropez next week and then the Star European championships.

Cayard and Erickson were world Star champions in 1988, although they were nosed out for an Olympic berth by Mark Reynolds of San Diego and Hal Haenel of Malibu--eventual silver medalists and repeat representatives for Barcelona this year.

Like several other American sailors, Cayard and Erickson would have tried again for the Olympics this year if the U.S. Trials hadn’t been scheduled in the middle of the America’s Cup racing in April.

“I’d love to have tried,” Cayard said. “The Olympics are something special, too.”

He also knows he could use a rest, and he plans to spend six weeks in Sweden--wife Icka’s homeland--this summer.

“I know what the score is on the water,” Cayard said. “I also know by my own accounting that we came a long way from scratch.

“When I moved to Italy 3 1/2 years ago, I was 29 years old, I didn’t speak Italian well and I had a baby. Boy, it was a big world out there. Right now, I feel in control of the situation, and I feel I achieved a lot. I’ve built up a team that now is world-renowned. Il Moro di Venezia is up there with New Zealand and Stars & Stripes. When you talk about the future you’ll wonder whether Il Moro is coming.

“I look at the whole thing as having been a very big success and a good steppingstone to the future.”

Parting shots:

- Stan Reid, chairman, Challenger of Record Committee--”I’d be less than honest if I didn’t say that I’m a little flat. We thought we had a good shot of winning the Cup, and I was a bit taken aback by the speed of the defender. They demonstrated what the America’s Cup is all about. If a designer can build a faster boat and crew it well, you win.

“Bill Koch and his team showed a superb degree of man management. We probably got the blinkers on on our side. The Louis Vuitton Cup is so hard to win that it is difficult for people to look beyond that.”

- Reid on spying--”I don’t know that it would have made any difference in the end, because I don’t think it matters how much you observe other people or how much Bill observed us. At the end of the day, he had a faster boat.”

- Koch on spying--”We designed America 3 . . . we froze the design in August of last year, before any of the (challengers’) final boats got here. So we did not know what their designs were, what their keels were, or anything. We had to go out on our own limb and say, all right, this is what our design is going to be, and we did it based on our own technology. We did not use anyone else’s technology.

“We did, however, try to observe and learn as much as we could from the competition because you want to configure your boat to be as competitive as possible against them.”

- Koch on himself: “Most people look at me as eccentric.”

Are you?

“I’m just a country boy goin’ down the road tryin’ to scratch out a livin’.”