Today we heard from our old friend Bob Fisher (GBR), dean of the "proper" yachting journalists (not to be confused with bloggers!) in response to our recent post, Friendly Competition. "Fish" is writing what no doubt will be a lengthy and very thorough history of the Cup. He recently turned up an interesting tidbit while doing research in the NYYC library, and writes:

The original Deed of Gift of the America's Cup was handwritten by George Schuyler to the NYYC on May 15th 1852. The date was subsequently altered (in the same hand) to July 8th 1857, the date when it was accepted by the club. The original is safely kept under temperature and humitity controlled conditions in the 'Rare Books and Archives Room' in the Library of the New York Yacht Club at 37 West 44th Street, Manhattan.

Our thanks to Fish for the insight.


George L. Schuyler (in
case you thought it was
an earlier photo of Bob).
Photo: AC Hall of Fame.

Rather than going on a Grand Tour as most of his Harvard classmates traditionally did (and unable to afford it anyway), and being something of a non-conformist, in 1834 Richard Henry Dana Jr left Harvard to enlist as a common sailor on a voyage around Cape Horn, on the brig Pilgrim. He returned to Massachusetts two years later. He kept a diary throughout the voyage, and after returning he wrote a recognized American classic, Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840, eleven years before that famous yacht race around the Isle of Wight.

Our many clever readers (of this blog) will need no help in drawing a number of parallels between Mr Dana's journey and the one we are in the midst of today, 166 years later. And how time does fly....

+ 27 years ago this week your editor moved to Newport, Rhode Island and had his first eye-opening exposure to the America's Cup.

+ 16 years ago today was an historic America's Cup moment, at least on shore. On 26 April 1990 the final court decision came down following the controversial 1988 Cup, confirming once and for all San Diego Yacht Club's win two years (and several million dollars in legal fees) earlier. This cleared the way for AC 27 to be held off San Diego in 1992. Significantly, it also marked the launch of the new America's Cup Class which, in the meantime, had been agreed with the Royal Perth Yacht Club -- SDYC's challenger-of-record-in-waiting.

+ Three years ago this week we had just wrapped up a long, hard week of meetings in Geneva with our friends from Alinghi, during which we essentially agreed the event plan for AC 32 as well as Version 5 (!) of the AC Class Rule. Today, nine new V5 ACC yachts are either in the water or soon will be, to say nothing of the dozen or so V4 yachts that have been modified to V5.

+ Two weeks from tomorrow we willl begin Act 10, an intense week of round-round match racing, followed almost immediately by Act 11's three days of fleet racing (five races). Much will be learned by all 12 teams who are urgently making final preparations, and no doubt there will be a few interesting revelations about relative performance. Perhaps most interesting will be what is not revealed.

+ One year from today we will be more than half way through the 20 round robin races in the Louis Vuitton Cup. A week later, on 5 May 2007, RR racing will be over and seven of the eleven Challengers will have been "excused from further participation." The other four Challengers will advance to the LVC knock-out semifinals.

For those of you not in Valencia it may be difficult to imagine the level and intensity of preparation going on here -- within the team bases, at ACM headquarters and the new race committee shore base, at the media center, all around the Port America's Cup, and, of course, out on the water. Never in my 27 years "before the mast" has there been more AC-related activity in one place at one time, not even close. And we still have another year to go!

The past four days have been unusually windy and rough, keeping the teams on shore. This morning conditions having moderated, and today we expect to see most if not all 12 teams on the water at the same time (and for the first time this year). In the few days now remaining before Act 10, no doubt there will be a number of interesting developments on shore and off.

George Santayana (1863-1952) is perhaps most famous for his assertion that "Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes." It appears in his five-volume study of Western rationalism published in 1905, and is often bastardized a bit as something akin to, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Interesting to note that not only was the long-lived Sr. Santayana (1863-1952) around for most of the early history of the Cup, but also was a Spanish citizen. In his travels back and forth between Europe and the North America he probably saw, and sailed on, any number of boats with bowsprits. Would he find them rational in today's Cup world?


The "low black schooner" America, constructed in 1851, in a painting by
the noted Rhode Island artist John Mecray.


NZL 20, dubbed the "Red Rocket", racing in the LVC
off San Diego in 1992.


NZL 20 restored to her original glory, twin-keel and all, and on display
in Auckland during AC 31. Will we see twin keels in AC 32? Or would that
be tilting at windmills? Is there a Don Quijote in the house? Photo credit:
"Editor Robert" of www.CupInfo.com.

Most days the New York Times runs a piece called "This Day in Sports" recalling the top sports stories, at least from an American perspective, of the past 100 or so years.

Today's NYT top story is about the African-American athlete, Jesse Owens, "who arrived on the national stage in a collegiate track meet by breaking a sprint record that had stood for seven years. From this moment on, the 21-year-old Owens dominated track and field, his career reaching its zenith when he won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (see Aug. 4). Those performances were historically significant because he disproved on the field Hitler's doctrine of Aryan supremacy."

Interestingly, the NYT says today's "runner-up" story is about the America's Cup and, to a degree, is also about equal opportunity -- in this case for women:

1994: Bill Koch, who successfully defended the America's Cup in 1992, announced that the first all-female crew in the history of the competition would sail his yacht, America 3, in the defender trials in January 1995. Koch later reneged, using a man as the starter and tactician, and America 3 lost to Black Magic of New Zealand, which won the Cup.

However, the august New York Times got some of the story wrong. "America Cubed" was the syndicate name, and their yacht USA-43 Mighty Mary actually lost to Team Dennis Conner during the defender trials in a bizarre, light-air final race that Mighty Mary led until just before the finish line -- one of the most thrilling finishes (or heartbreaking, depending, of course, on your perspective) in the history of Cup racing.

With their win that day off Point Loma, TDC advanced to the Match against the Kiwis, but first did a deal to switch from their slower USA-34 Stars & Stripes to PACT 95's yacht USA-36 Young America (the third defense candidate, and otherwise known as The Mermaid for the painting on its topsides by the noted artist Roy Lichtenstein). It didn't matter -- Team New Zealand's Black Magic was by far the best boat and team in San Diego that year, and in the AC Match the Defender was drubbed 5-0 by the Kiwis.

The man Bill Koch used as "starter and tactician" was David Dellenbaugh, brother of AC 32 chief umpire, Brad Dellenbaugh. Coincidentally, he displaced the American Olympic medalist JJ Isler, wife of BMW ORACLE's navigator Peter Isler. Of the experience Dave has written:

But in the end we were still the Women's Team, and the sailing crew exceeded almost everyone's expectations. The women proved that they are strong enough and skilled enough to function as sailors at the top level. They were able to do all this because they improved together as a team more than any of their competitors. In my opinion, that is a credit to the women, to the support network behind them, and to the principles of teamwork and attitude....

Historical footnote: through the '95 Cup cooperation by teams -- indeed, sharing equipment and even switching boats -- was permitted among teams representing yachts clubs of the same nation (defenders and challengers). After the Team NZ win, they installed strict rules in the AC 30 Protocol against sharing of design information, yachts and major equipment between competing teams even of the same nation, and those rules remain today.


Mighty Mary and Stars & Stripes racing during the Defender Finals
in lumpy conditions off San Diego's Point Loma in 1995. Photo
courtesy Louis Vuitton.

Today's post on the Challenger Commission Blog may be of interest to our team, families and friends.

Check out the very interesting feature that is currently the lead story on the ACM website about 1893 defense candidates Pilgrim (below) and Jubilee. Quoting from the story by Jacques Taglang with translation from the original French by Peter Rusch, "[Pilgrim and Jubilee] were, in 1893, exceptional and audacious craft. To observe closely their modern offspring such as the Tempest class, the Soling and the America’s Cup Class, is to see the power of this early design breakthrough."


Back to the Future: 1893 Defense candidate Pilgrim, a forerunner to
today's AC class.

Interesting article a week or so back by Tim Lane in Melbourne's The Age newspaper. Recently an Australian radio station conducted a poll asking listeners to rank the top 25 sports moments in Australian history. Numero uno was the win by Australia II in the 1983 Cup.

The complete article is here, and we have excerpted a good chunk of it below. Good ink for the Cup and the most famous challenger of all time, to say nothing of a reminder to all of us about what an AC win can mean....


The America's Cup success touched the national psyche in a way that clearly
has stood the test of time. In spite of the impression of the America's Cup as a
rich men's plaything, regardless of the fate that befell Alan Bond, and in
defiance of the fact that for the masses this isn't a spectator sport, and that
until the final race of the 1983 contest there was no television coverage
anyway, the America's Cup win remains etched in our national
consciousness.

It's fair to say there's no great mystery as to why: it was a classic
victory for the little guy, and we were him. We knocked off the most powerful
nation on earth in a battle of technology, as well as of sporting skill, and we
were able to thumb our collective nose at what became a convenient embodiment of
American power, and thus arrogance, namely the New York Yacht Club. The reasons
for the event's enduring appeal are beyond argument.

What does remain open to debate, though, is just what it was that enabled
Australia to snap the US's 132-year winning streak. Was it, as Bertrand argued
passionately in his 1985 book Born to Win, the performance of his crew and
sail-cutting team, or was it, as the Americans prefer to view it, a contentious
breakthrough in 12-metre yacht design that won the day?

The Americans were obsessed with the Australian
challenger well before the showdown arrived. As the three potential US defenders
battled out their elimination trials, one American said: "We have boat trouble
and her name is Australia II." The NYYC challenged the legitimacy of Ben
Lexcen's winged keel and even sought to demonstrate that it was a Dutch
design.

Halsey Herreshoff, who was Dennis Conner's navigator on board the American
defender, Liberty, foreshadowed in the lead-up that if the keel design was
allowed to "continue to be rated without penalty," Australia II was likely to
win. It is salient to note that Herreshoff subsequently appears to have made a
different assessment. In reviewing the event, he said "the ballyhoo about that
(the keel) masked the significant facts that Australia II was the first boat to
go to minimum 12-metre length and displacement and that she had significantly
less wetted surface than any other Twelve; this latter fact won the
Cup!"

On the matter of ballyhoo, he is in agreement with Bertrand. The Australian
skipper claimed in his book that he used the mystery of the keel to unsettle the
Americans and that Conner "was vulnerable because he had fallen victim."
Bertrand insists while his boat was more manoeuvrable at the starts and in
tacking duels, in most conditions, it was no faster than Liberty.

Conner's view is reflected, presumably, in the preface of a 1987
reprint of his 1978 book, No Excuse to Lose. There, his collaborator John
Rousmaniere praises Conner for coming "within a few seconds of winning … against
a vastly superior boat."


Regardless, the 1983 Cup will go down in history, along with 1920 and 1934, as one of the very few great AC Matches.

Speaking of John Rousmaniere, a long-time friend and noted Cup historian, he has written a nice piece for the current (March 2006) issue of Sailing World magazine. Entitled "Who Designed Australia II?", hopefully the article will sooner or later end up on the mags website.

With all that has been done to liven up the proceedings for AC 32, and the close and intense competition to date, is 2007 shaping up to be another barn burner like '83?

We would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate the family and supporters of Australia II's design coordinator, the late Ben Lexcen (née Bob Miller), who has finally been elected to the AC Hall of Fame (for induction this coming October). There should have never been any question that Mr Lexcen was a crucial factor in A II's success and hence deserving of the HoF recognition; but that got lost in the on-going emotion over whether non-Aussies also participated in the design. Under today's AC rules, all that transpired in 1982-83 is a non-issue.

So it is good to see that both Australia II's win, and Ben Lexcen, have withstood the test of time; and heartening to know that the AC rules have been modernized in respect of designers, accommodating the march of time.


Australia II winning race 7, and the 1983 Cup -- ending
NYYC's 132-year winning streak. Photo© Daniel Forster from
the Scuttlebutt website.


Ben Lexcen on A II's keel in Newport, the day after winning the
1983 Cup. All summer the keel had been shrouded when A II was
in the boathoist at the dock. The paint job was to help disguise the
keel's radical shape from helicopter photograpers when A II was
sailing. Photo© Dan Nerney.


Ben Lexcen, 1936-1988. Photo© Dan Nerney.


Our thanks to another long-time (as opposed to old?) friend and NYYC member, Dan Nerney, whose two by now classic photos of "Benny" are used above, with his kind permission.

On this day in 1959 Vanguard 2 was launched. The first-ever earth orbiting weather satellite, it was designed to measure cloud-cover distribution over the daylight portion of its orbit.

We mentioned this historical footnote to Chris Bedford today, and he offered to help put it in perspective....

"Modern-day weather forecasting would be impossible without weather satellites," Chris said. "The way in which they impact our daily lives is astounding, really. Imagine a time when [Europeans] had no idea what weather systems where lurking over the North Atlantic Ocean, poised to bring rain on your grape vines or worse, flood your village!

"Today, computer models translate satellite images into numerical representations of the atmosphere. These models then predict the movement of the associated weather systems and in turn, allow us to define and forecast the winds in general over an entire continent, and, more specifically, on the America's Cup course, with amazing accuracy. Even still, we can't see everything with a weather satellite. Our weather team of Rod Dawson, Nathan Williams, and Jeff Clark keep a close up view on the clouds from below, and on the water, for that critical final call just before the 5 minute signal."


First weather eye in the sky. Photo courtesy of NASA and Wikipedia.


Met head Chris Bedford (USA) with his deputy Rod Dawson (NZL) in their
new office at the team base.


Met team members Nathan Williams (NZL) and Jeff Clark (NZL) -- four
more weather eyes on the sky and water.

Since it is already 6 Feb in NZL, best wishes to all of our Kiwi colleagues and friends on the occasion of your national holiday, Waitangi Day.

Waitangi Day is a public holiday in New Zealand held each year on February 6 to celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand's founding document, on that date in 1840.

...the more they stay the same?

An interesting and insightful (if not inciteful) letter in today's Scuttlebutt (North America):

* From Rick Best (edited to our 250-word limit): Santa brought me a copy of
Temple to the Wind, by Christopher Pastore, a wonderful book about
Herreshoff and Reliance. I sat down by the fire looking forward to a trip
to the golden age of racing and the America's Cup, when "boats were
stronger then the men that sailed them," and the American's Cup "was a
contest between nations not hired guns." Imagine my surprise when I read
that the masts of both Constitution and Shamrock II fell down in trials in
1901. The London Daily Graphic called the boats "dangerous monstrosities,"
the New York Times said they were "enormities unfit for ocean."

According to the book the challenger Lipton was not a sailor, but using the
race for advertising for his grocery store chain. Despite being nominated
by the Prince of Wales, the Royal Yacht Squadron of England refused him
admission on two occasions. He challenged for the Cup under the sponsorship
of the Royal Ulster Yacht Club. The American effort was bankrolled by
railroad, banking and oil barons who were indulging in their "predatory
habit of life."

But the worst was that the great American sailing legend Charlie Barr was
Scottish! Crews threatened to quit rather then work for the "foreigner."
Editorials were written that the American effort should be lead by "native
born Americans." But the money men, and Nat Herreshoff, wanted to win and
Charlie Barr was man to do it. I haven't even got to the Reliance-Shamrock
III race yet.



Back to the Future.