STARS AND STRIPES : Thanks to Crew’s Idea, Conner Didn’t Miss Boat

Who says Dennis Conner never listens to his crew? If Conner had gotten his way last spring, he’d probably be heading home to San Diego for Christmas next week.

Instead, he is pleased to have been over-ruled by his old mainsheet trimmer, John Marshall, and is still on course to reclaim the America’s Cup.

The plan of Conner’s Sail America syndicate from its inception in 1984 was to build three new boats--Stars & Stripes ‘85, ’86 and ‘87--with Marshall in charge as design team coordinator. But Conner was so pleased with the first one that he was willing to scuttle the two others.

“To some degree, ’85 surprised us by being a remarkable boat,” Marshall said. “I had to argue with Dennis because Dennis’ point of view was that ‘We have a good enough boat, let’s put our resources behind better sails, better electronics and so on.’

“The syndicate’s point of view was, ‘Why build another boat? It’s hard to raise the money, and if we can win with the boat we have, it would be a lot easier to pay all the bills.’

“My point of view was that the boat was not good enough to win. The rest of the world was moving forward. At the time ’85 was built, she was the best 12-meter in the world, but today she’s not. We argued very strongly that she, in fact, was only a step.”

The syndicate, looking at another $500,000 expenditure and a ballooning $15 million budget, also had S&S; ‘86, but sailing her was out of the question, Marshall said. “She’s the first development of the radical hull form,” he said. “We built it as a research boat, not a racing boat. She’s dimensionally way out of whack for what would be optimum here.”

According to Marshall, if Conner had insisted on sailing ‘85, “We’d still be winning the heavy weather races, but we wouldn’t be winning the medium- and light-weather races.”

And, with the points so tight and the racing so close in the third round of the challenger trials, the difference is being in third place now with Stars & Stripes ’87 or out of the running for the four-boat semifinals after Christmas with S&S; ’85.

Marshall, 44 and a former president of North Sails, was part of Conner’s crew that won the Cup on Freedom in ’80 and lost it on Liberty in ’83. He hoped to be on the boat again this time--in fact, took an unpaid leave of absence from his new job with Hinckley Yachts in Maine--but his expertise is being exploited in the technical end of the program, instead.

“Our basic concept was that the America’s Cup in 1983 was won by boat speed and by superior technology,” Marshall said. “Compare that to the attitude in our country that the winner would ultimately be determined by sailing skill and tactics.

“Dennis in particular felt that the efforts he’d made to have new concepts developed were failures, and it proved that the (conventional) designs we already had were as good as you could get.

“We lost the America’s Cup by being complacent about the intellectual side of the thing. There was no technology applied to the 1983 designs. There was virtually no tank testing, no computer analysis, no technological team. We needed new ideas.”

That idea was shared by most syndicates, but all conventional boat designers weren’t ready to accept space-age theories. Marshall’s group, consisting of respected naval architects Britton Chance Jr., Bruce Nelson and David Pedrick, was.

“Our concept was to bring the different skills together and manage it rather than leaving an individual yacht designer in charge of it, and to do a series of boats where each would benefit from the preceding lessons of the previous boat,” Marshall said.

“The problem is to integrate them into a concept that works and not get into the problem that Eagle got into with an outright slow boat, or the problem that San Francisco has with a boat (USA) that goes fast occasionally.”

Marshall also is convinced that Sail America had a better idea testing and training in the blustery Molokai Channel of Hawaii rather than off Fremantle, as America II did with its three new boats. When the Fremantle Doctor, the strong-gusting summer wind, is out, Fremantle is just another gentle day sail.

“We wanted to train in the place that would give us the most months out of 12 with conditions comparable to December, January and February in Fremantle,” Marshall said. “Fremantle has only three months which are comparable to those three months. Hawaii has nine.”

Sail America also had Liberty as a benchmark and a rebuilt Spirit of America for training.

“It’s a little windier and a little rougher in Hawaii--Marlboro country out there for 12-meters--so the guys aren’t intimidated when it’s windy here,” Marshall said.

“(America II) spent a lot of time sailing here in nontypical conditions, and they relied on the same yacht-design firm (Sparkman & Stephens) that had produced a whole string of essentially identical boats, and they produced three more essentially identical boats. There’s not much creativity there. They look to me to be three peas in a pod.

“They’re good medium-air boats. They can win. They could still win. But their boat, to me, is not a boat that’s optimum for Fremantle.”

In Stars & Stripes ‘87, Sail America arrived at a 12-meter that is “very radical,” even if it doesn’t appear so, Marshall said.

“From an appendage point of view--rudder, keel, wings--’87 is modestly radical but not extreme, not a shot out of the corner. But the other area that can be drastically different is the form of the hull itself. Our hull form is certainly the most radical hull form in this regatta.”

S&S; ‘87, a nice medium shade of blue, has been dubbed the “banana boat” for the obvious curve in its deck.

“The sheer line is visibly different, but what’s underwater is more different,” Marshall said.

Sail America took a calculated risk by building a boat specifically for strong wind and heavy seas. The syndicate’s resolve was tested in the second round when the wind failed to blow and Conner lost 4 of 11 races.

Marshall said: “We looked at 15 years of meteorological data and saw, on the average, that we’re going to see 60 to 70% of the winds 15 knots or greater.

“Therefore, we know we’re going to lose some races in light wind, but we’d better damn well be fast when it blows 15 knots or more.

“December, so far, has been slightly windier than normal, but as a whole the season is running right about on the numbers.”

The one disconcerting fact is that New Zealand and its fiberglass KZ7 are running away from everybody else in the trials.

“They’re probably a little better than us in light wind and a little slower than us in heavy wind,” Marshall said. “You’re looking at very two evenly matched boats.

“There’s a possibility there’ll be a shift toward fiberglass if the rules aren’t enforced, and we’re on record as being quite concerned that there’s no effective enforcement of the rules.

“The rules require that fiberglass and aluminum be equal in their performance characteristics. As long as people stick to that, there’s no reason to build fiberglass, which is more expensive, harder to modify, harder to repair. It’s in every way an inferior material for building a 12-meter, except for one thing: It’s an open invitation to larceny if the rules are not enforced.

“It’s easier for a surveyor to check that aluminum plating is the thickness it’s supposed to be. Fiberglass construction is a composite. Fiberglass in the Olympic classes has been a nightmare to control.”

Lloyd’s Register is the official authority for approving 12-meter construction. Lloyd’s insists it had a man monitoring every step of KZ7’s construction.

Marshall remains unconvinced. “The America’s Cup committee has taken a very lenient stand, allowing a single individual from Lloyd’s to be the only person in the world who knows whether the New Zealand boat is legal,” he said. “All the other speed-producing factors are controlled.”

Conner and Australia’s John Bertrand disagree on whether the boat or the crew won in ’83.

“You can’t win the America’s Cup without a fast boat,” Marshall said. “But you can lose it with a fast boat if you don’t also have good sails, good crew . . . the program has to be complete.”

Jon Wright, 39, is Sail America’s crew manager and mainsail trimmer. In an 18-month sailing program, burnout is always a concern.

“I take it in chunks, each series as it comes,” Wright said. “The biggest thing, as I explained to the guys, is that it’s a long haul. You don’t look at a calendar.

“It was obvious at the end of Hawaii that the guys were getting kind of tired. There weren’t any other boats around, we were in our own compound, up at 5:45 and we’d sail till late, then dinner at 8 and you’d just go to bed.

“Coming down here, it was exciting again for the guys. There were a lot of other 12-meters around.”

Wright said that Sail America looked at “about 60 or 70 people” until settling on about 25, which is two crews of 10 each, plus reserves.

The opportunity was irresistible: Room and board, about $75 a week for expenses “and the experience of a lifetime,” Wright said.

It’s a different type of crew from ’83 because of the heavy conditions, Wright said.

“We knew we needed big guys--bigger than we had in Newport, as far as grinders go. We looked at some rowers. Rowers have tremendous endurance.”

Tom Darling, of Boston, was an Olympic rower. He and fellow grinder John Grant, a 43-year-old Marine from New Jersey, organized a weight-training program, moving the equipment progressively from San Diego to Hawaii to Fremantle.

Racing daily, they don’t lift weights, but the presence of New Zealand keeps the S&S; crew pumped up.

“Frankly, if the Kiwis weren’t here, we wouldn’t be pushed enough to win the America’s Cup,” Wright said.

They lost last Thursday’s match by 32 seconds because of a late spinnaker drop at the last mark.

“We talked about that quite a bit,” Wright said. “It won’t happen again. We should have been able to pull it off up front, (but) the back could have helped us a little bit by turning the boat a little more to help us get the chute down. It’s a team thing. We went for a little extra gain and we blew it.

“The crew takes a lot of pride in doing everything just right. It’s not like football, where you line up against the guy and try to beat his brains out.”

If Marshall’s perseverance has given them the boat, the rest is up to the crew.

“The final two boats in our series--us and the Kiwis--and the final two boats in the America’s Cup, it’s going to be the sailing of the boat,” Wright said.