AMERICA’S CUP ’92 : AMERICA’S CUP NOTEBOOK : These Boats’ Hopes Could Be Riding on Breaks of the Mast

Anytime a sailboat has an overwhelming lead somebody is sure to say, “He should win unless the mast falls down.”

Bite your tongue. This is the new America’s Cup. Two masts--New Zealand’s and Italy’s-- have fallen down. They won’t be the last. One keel bulb--Spain’s--fell off.

The old aluminum 12-meters could hit an iceberg and keep on truckin’. Compared to the new boats, they were trucks. The new boats, built of carbon-fiber with the idea that lighter is faster, come with unknown frailties and five-minute warranties, and the worst usually happens without warning.

John Kolius was driving the second Il Moro di Venezia boat upwind in a syndicate speed test alongside Paul Cayard’s boat last week. Warm sun. Blue sky.

Suddenly, Kolius said, there was “just a big bang and the mast hit the water.”

The Kiwis’ dismasting in February was less spectacular. The top part of their mast folded over and hung limp like a bird’s broken wing. This one broke at the boom, like a tree felled by a lumberjack.

The boat’s speed dropped from nine knots to zero “in about eight feet,” Kolius told Cayard later. Cayard said Kolius did a “face plant” into the wheel. When the boat went from heeled over to straight up, two crewmen, Massimo Procopio and Sergio Mauro, who were sitting on the windward rail were pitched into the sea, wet but unhurt. Maybe crewmen will have to start wearing seat belts.

Cayard said, “I just heard the big bang. When I looked under the boom I could still see it coming down. It takes like three, four seconds . . . just floated down.”

“Luckily, we were the windward boat,” Kolius said, or the mast might have fallen on Cayard.

And if they had been sailing downwind, the mast might have fallen forward onto the bowmen.

In the last Cup with 12-meters at Fremantle in 1986-87, crews were more concerned about being thrown into the rough seas for shark bait. This Cup’s worry will be falling masts. Maybe they should start wearing crash helmets, too.

The mast also broke near the top when it hit the water. It was disconnected from the boat and rigged with floats until a salvage crew could drag it back to shore at 1 a.m. Scratch one $650,000 mast.

“I’ve lost masts before,” Kolius said, “but certainly not one that expensive.”

It’s the new technology that makes the new masts so expensive, although Il Moro gets a discount because it owns the factory. They are constructed of carbon-fiber instead of aluminum and are supposed to be stronger but lighter. But when they break it’s scary.

Kolius said, “It wasn’t like a shroud (supporting cable) parting, when you hear it tearing away. It was just a big bang.”

Glen Sowry of the New Zealand crew, writing in New Zealand Yachting magazine about his boat’s dismasting, said, “A carbon-fiber mast breaking is a far more devastating event than an aluminum spar collapsing. An explosion at the top of the rig is accompanied by a cloud of carbon dust and splinters.”

Sowry said fragments of titanium fittings were embedded in the deck, like shrapnel.

The formula for the new International America’s Cup Class fixes the height of the mast but not the amount of sail area or ballast, so the designers loaded up with lead in the keel to offset the wind pressure on clouds of sail and keep the boat upright. But then they had to overtighten the shrouds and stays that hold up the mast to keep it stiff, straight and efficient, and the crews have been loading it more and more to find out how much it will take.

Fernando Sena, director of the Cantiere Tencara shipyard that built the Il Moro boats, said, “(Any) mast must be maintained straight in column or it buckles. Even if it’s straight, if you reach the buckling load it becomes unstable.”

So with the slightest twist, or if the loads become more than the mast can bear, the mast tries to drive itself through the bottom of the boat or, more likely, simply buckle and explode. It’s like sailing with a time bomb on board.

Nobody knows why the mast broke. Sena looks upon it as a research and development problem.

“Destruction testing is difficult to do in a mast,” he said, “(but) we’re going to learn a lot from this. I don’t think we’ll build them any heavier. We could find a flaw in the construction . . . (but) I’d say it probably had something to do with the handling of the mast.”

Human error?

“Exactly.”

Incidentally, Sowry said New Zealand learned why its mast broke but, after making modifications, isn’t about to tell anybody.

“As this area is one which the opposition syndicates may yet have to face, we are keeping the exact cause and remedy of the mast failure under wraps,” Sowry said.

Everyone has to learn the hard way.

Kolius said the wind was 17 knots--about where someone would think of de-powering the rig by reducing sail area and thus reducing the risk. The skippers are only starting to learn how hard they can push these boats.

Chris Dickson of the Nippon Challenge, also writing in New Zealand Yachting, said, “When the boats are pushed hard in race conditions for the first time during the (IACC) Worlds (May 4-11), there will be quite a few gear breakdowns, blown-out sails, boat-handling problems and perhaps something more major. The huge mainsail generates very large loads on the whole section of what is already a tall, thin and marginal mast.”

And because about 70% of the boat’s entire displacement (weight) is at the bottom of the keel 13 feet under the waterline, “this results in enormous power from the huge sail area balanced by an equally huge amount of stability,” Dickson said. “So the crew is left with the dilemma of a very stable and powerful yacht with too much sail area, too much boatspeed, short courses, no lifelines and a hull, keel and mast made out of new technology materials.”

Il Moro has an ample supply of masts, unlike Dennis Conner, who has only one.

The most serious problem the broken mast created for the Italians was to decide which two of their three boats to sail in the worlds. About the time the third boat arrived by air, they had told the America’s Cup Organizing Committee a few days earlier they would sail two boats in the worlds. They had almost decided to retire No. 2 after the worlds and start working with No. 3.

Now they must decide whether to refit the dismasted No. 2 for the worlds or try to get No. 3 ready. No. 2 was finely tuned. No. 3 won’t be.

Montedison is a world leader in carbon-fiber technology, Hercules Aerospace another, but that’s where similarities end.

Hercules, the Utah giant that built Bill Koch’s new America-3 boat, also has built chasses for the McLaren race cars and components for the Voyager around-the-world-without-refueling airplane and its main line of assorted rockets and missiles named Patriot, Trident, Titan and Poseidon.

The company’s first boat was built secretly at Hercules’ Clearfield Plant 2 location, an old dynamite factory 40 miles north of Salt Lake City near Ogden. Koch leased a shed and had about 60 people working for six months. Apparently, they were the only ones among Hercules’ 4,000 employees who knew about it.

Company executive Bill Hawkesworth said, “I didn’t know what was going on, and I’m director of public affairs.”

Neither did the Soviet inspectors stationed at Hercules’ main plant as part of a missile treaty. Funny they didn’t think to ask. The Red Star boats are built in the Soviets’ Energia space plant near Moscow.

The death of Viktor Hendrikson, executive director of the Soviets’ Red Star syndicate, is a blow to the team--”not fatal, but crippling,” says Doug Smith, the American representative.

Hendrikson spoke English and had important contacts in the West. “He was a quiet guy,” Smith said, “and a stabilizing influence.”

Hendrikson, 52, and six German and Russian companions were killed two weeks ago while on a helicopter skiing expedition on 18,000-foot Mt. Elbros in the Caucuses. At first stranded when their first helicopter lost power but landed safely, they also survived an avalanche and were aboard a second rescue helicopter returning to retrieve camera gear from the first.