Sinking From View

While operations were underway to raise Dennis Conner’s sunken Stars & Stripes USA 77 to the surface off Long Beach late Tuesday afternoon, the owner was nowhere to be seen, leading some to wonder whether he had gone down with the ship.

No, he was back at the training base on Terminal Island fixing dinner for his cold, hungry crew that would be bringing the salvaged vessel home shortly before midnight.

“Dennis had come back and made a big pot of chili for all the guys,” said Bill Trenkle, general manager of Team Dennis Conner. “They really appreciated it because some of them had been diving and hooking up the crane. There were plenty of cold puppies that appreciated the warm chili.”

Conner hadn’t been on the boat. He seldom is these days. Confident to leave sailing and administrative matters in capable hands, he spends more time schmoozing with sponsors who are providing the $30 million-$40 million necessary to run a successful America’s Cup campaign.

The America’s Cup trials begin Oct. 1 in Auckland, New Zealand.

In fact, when USA 77 sank, he and some sponsors were on a launch on their way to meet the boat to go for a ride.

As Trenkle said, “About 99% of the time, we’re offshore in a couple thousand feet of water, which would have been a bad place to sink.”

There would be little hope of recovering the boat from the middle of the San Pedro Channel between Santa Catalina Island and the mainland, where the team normally works. But, on this occasion, they had come in closer to transfer the VIPs onto the race boat in the calmer waters behind the Long Beach breakwater.

Thank heaven for sponsors.

“Technically, it was not a sinking. It was a grounding and a swamping,” Conner said.

Another small miracle was how the boat remained upright after it sank, half its 110-foot mast remaining out of the water. The secret: Before it went down in about four minutes, the crew had inflated some air bags inside, and then the keel planted itself in the mud like a tulip.

Several of the 15 crew members, including navigator Peter Isler, jumped into the water, the others hopping onto chase boats.

“I didn’t have a chance really to think,” Isler said. “Just act fast, helping to pull down the sails, pass out life jackets, get the pumps and air bags distributed in the right place, and then it was time to jump in.”

Although a structural failure in the rudder housing caused the boat to sink, there also was concern about the 18-inch cracks along the port and starboard gunwales, opposite the mast.

“We heard some cracks when it went down,” Trenkle said, “so we’re still trying to sort that out.”

But he did not link the cracks with the broken hulls that sank oneAustralia at San Diego in 1995 and almost sank Young America at Auckland in ’99.

Trenkle said, “The other failures happened back by the keel area, which is much more highly stressed, well aft of the mast. [These cracks] are not really in a critical part of the boat.”

It’s unusual that the incident even occurred in the United States. For more than a year, eight of the nine challengers have been in and out of Auckland with the seasons like swallows, probably wondering what Team DC was up to 7,500 miles away.

The six-month routine of testing and training started with USA 66 breaking its mast in February, before USA 77 was built. That it ended with USA 77 surviving a sinking is about all the rest of the sailing world knows.

With as low a profile as Mr. America’s Cup can manage, Conner has chosen to work in relative isolation from a modest base lost amid the containers and cranes of the massive commercial shipping operation.

Their last sail will be today, albeit with a single boat, USA 66. The injured USA 77 will be shipped to New Zealand on Wednesday, to be followed by USA 66 a week later.

“It’ll go down to New Zealand and be repaired and we’ll be sailing by the end of August, as we planned,” Trenkle said.

Conner said the damage “is definitely not mortal.”

A couple of hiccups like a broken mast and a sunken boat aside, the training program has been rated successful.

“We’ve had excellent conditions, from nine to 20 knots [of wind], so we’ve had a lot of good sailing,” Conner said.

The 25-mile-wide channel is ideal for fine-tuning America’s Cup boats, as Paul Cayard’s AmericaOne team learned in 1999.

Trenkle said, “This has let us train every day without the constraints of bad weather. Compared to most places, it’s very reliable. We haven’t lost one day because of bad weather or no wind.”

Ken Read, the 40-year-old helmsman from Newport, R.I., has driven one boat, tactician Terry Hutchinson the other. The crews might as well have been punching clocks. They sail together upwind for a long time, then they sail together downwind, testing incremental adjustments in sail trim and sailing angles against the static platform provided by the other boat.

It’s not very compelling drama, but it exploits a valuable tool the team lacked in 1999-2000: a second state-of-the-art boat for a benchmark.

What does it achieve?

Conner said, “In the end, it’s gonna be who has the fast boat and makes the fewest mistakes.”

That’s as controversial a comment as he has made recently. This time he has remained relatively clear of the usual America’s Cup squabbling. He’s letting other guys play that game.

Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison took Cayard, one of the world’s most illustrious and charismatic sailors, off his sailing team for reasons still unexplained but most likely nothing more than envy.

OneWorld, the Seattle-based syndicate owned by billionaires Craig McCaw and Paul Allen, is in trouble for allegedly stealing design data from defender Team New Zealand.

Italy’s elegant Prada also is sweating out a decision that could--but probably won’t--mean disqualification for suing Oracle for allegedly playing peekaboo from a barge located partially in front of Oracle’s compound. Suing a rival is prohibited by the America’s Cup Protocol.

Project manager Mats Johansson continues with Sweden’s Victory Challenge, pending appeal after being sentenced to eight months in jail for tax evasion.

With all that, sailing pundits generally rate Team Dennis Conner no worse than No. 2 among the challengers, behind Switzerland’s Alinghi led by former New Zealand national hero-turned-defector, Russell Coutts.

Conner is not impressed.

“Who remembers who finished second?” he asked.

Actually ...

For this campaign, his ninth, Conner is reunited with the proud New York Yacht Club, which he last represented when he lost the Cup to Alan Bond’s Australia II in 1983 at Newport, R.I. It took the club a couple decades to get over it.

Meanwhile, Conner went to Fremantle in ‘86-87 to get it back from the Aussies for the San Diego Yacht Club. Although he lost it to New Zealand at San Diego in ‘95, the earlier success remains the defining moment of his career.

That was the last time he had more than one boat--the first in a long line of Stars & Stripes, long before patriotism was back in style. As in ‘86-87, the first-string crew is made up of all Americans, one of the few boats that will race with a single nationality of sailors.

There is another parallel to ‘86-87 in the current campaign. While everyone else was in one another’s faces in Australia, Conner tested and trained in Hawaii, then blew everybody away at Fremantle.

Sixteen years later, Conner has surrendered the sailing to younger blood, although he still races regularly on his personal boats.

“I’d rather have Kenny’s job,” Conner said. “But if I didn’t raise the money, we wouldn’t have a campaign.”

He almost didn’t have one last time.

Lacking funds, he filed his challenge at the last minute, had only one boat built--hastily--and the team met for the first time in Auckland only a month before its first race.

Read said, “Can you imagine what we did last time ... how little time we had and how unprepared we were? We showed up there with 30 days to go before our first race. As a team we had never stepped on an America’s Cup boat together, and here we are sailing since Feb. 2. It seems like a dream come true.”

In that previous campaign, Stars & Stripes came up one point short of qualifying for a sail off against Prada for the second slot in the challenger finals, opposite AmericaOne--after having had a point deducted earlier for using a rudder built illegally in Australia.

That’s what has rivals worried now: If Team Dennis Conner could come so close with so little, what will it do with its present resources?

Conner also will tell you that in America’s Cup history, the most money often fails to win.

But sponsors are important. They can save your boat.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.