Conner’s Hopes Are Raised

Dennis Conner, who has won and lost the America’s Cup more than anybody else, will make another kind of history in the sport’s premier event today.

When the quarterfinals of the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger trials start at Auckland, New Zealand, his crew will be sailing the only boat in the 151-year history of the event to sink and sail again.

Skipper-helmsman Ken Read said Monday that they were parking Stars & Stripes USA 66, which won only six of 16 races in the early going. Instead, they will meet Britain’s GBR with USA 77, which sank in 55 feet of water off Long Beach on July 23 when the rudder came off and the sea gushed in through the fractured housing.

With a flair for drama, Read announced, “Team Dennis Conner will be sailing back-from-the-depths USA-77.”

Conner lives in San Diego but is representing the New York Yacht Club.

The quarterfinals had been scheduled to start Monday -- Tuesday in New Zealand -- but the fleet remained in port with forecasts of winds well over the 19-knot limit for starting races. Forecasts for today were an ideal breeze of 15 knots.

A salvage team was able to recover USA 77 within seven hours, through fortuitous timing. Just before sinking, the boat had sailed in close to shore from the much deeper San Pedro Channel to take on Conner and a group of sponsors.

“Well,” Conner told them later, “it’s not every day you get to see an America’s Cup boat sink.”

In fact, it has happened only one other time: at San Diego in 1995 when the hull of John Bertrand’s oneAustralia, with Rod Davis as helmsman, cracked open. . That boat sank in two minutes flat and remains on the bottom off Point Loma.

America’s Cup competitors are allowed to build two boats. In a way, Team Dennis Conner, as well as rival Prada, have built three. Working near the limit of the rules, both replaced entire bow sections forward of the mast -- Team DC by necessity, the Italians by choice -- and the new bows are updated designs.

Team DC spokesman Keith Taylor said, “The new bow was a modification of the original, to reflect the improvements they had decided on after testing in Long Beach prior to the accident.”

The eight remaining challengers -- only Italy’s Mascalzone Latino has been eliminated -- had the option of switching boats before the quarterfinals but only two did. Seattle’s OneWorld, which slipped from 8-0 in the first round to 5-3 in the second, will race USA 65 instead of USA 67.

USA 77 was shipped to Auckland a few days after it sank. Because the damage to the bow was extensive, the team chose to replace the whole section. It was finished by the original builder, New England Boatworks in Portsmouth, R.I., and shipped to New Zealand to be mated with the rest of the hull. The crew has sailed it on 20 days since it was launched in early October.

Nevertheless ... how do they feel about sailing the boat that sank from under them 3 1/2 months ago?

“The boat builders have done a spectacular job,” Read said. “You take the engineering data and you take the information the boat builders present to you. They say it’s fine, but then you have to go out and sail the boat and prove it to yourself.

“We really wanted to use USA 77 in the second round-robin but we hadn’t quite proved to ourselves that the boat was as solid as we needed it to be, in order to push it as hard as possible. Since then we’ve done some more testing and it has been blowing plenty hard. We’ve had it out in some good breezes with no creaks or groans.

“In fact, it’s a quieter boat at this point than USA 66, so we have no worries from a strength standpoint.”

But the largest factor in the decision to switch was obvious: The team thinks USA 77 is faster than USA 66, which seemed off the pace with most of its competitors last month.

“This is what we have always considered to be our race boat,” Read said. “Our mishap in California set our program back a bit, but we’ve worked really hard. We’re very comfortable with it now, and comfortable that it does have a performance edge over USA 66.

“Therefore it became an easy decision.”

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America’s Cup

The challengers are now matched up in four best-of-seven series, separated into upper and lower brackets, according to their won-lost records in the round robins:

UPPER BRACKET

* Alinghi (13-3) vs. Prada (11-5).

* Oracle (12-4) vs. OneWorld (13-3*).

*One point deducted as penalty.

LOWER BRACKET

* Victory (7-9) vs. Le Defi (2-14).

* GBR (7-9) vs. Team Dennis Conner (6-10).

Upper bracket winners advance directly into the semifinals. The losers will face off against the lower bracket winners to select the other two semifinalists. Lower bracket losers are eliminated.