Anatomy of a Disaster

Approaching the first leeward mark of Race Two, USA-76 was making a good gain on Alinghi, cutting what had been a 26-second top mark delta down to just a couple of boat lengths. To make the gain stick, skipper Chris Dickson gybed USA-76 a few lengths short of the layline, cutting the corner on Alinghi and sailing on a very deep run into the mark. “That was just a tactical decision to allow us to close right in and make them sail through our dirty air,” explained Ian Burns, a member of the Oracle BMW Racing afterguard.

On Alinghi, a couple boat lengths ahead, the spinnaker was duly gathered aboard, and the team started heading up to round the mark. It was at this point that the Oracle BMW crew should have started to take the spinnaker down. Instead, a jammer cleat slipped, the sail went into the water, the spinnaker pole broke and by the time the mess was cleaned up, Alinghi was nearly 200 metres clear.

“Sailing deep into the mark wasn’t the problem really,” Burns explained after the race. “The whole situation is that just a tiny little jammer, probably the smallest fitting on the whole boat, the rope (the spinnaker pole topping lift) just slipped through it and stripped the rope. Once that happened the pole went down. Once the pole was down it dragged the spinnaker under the bow and all of sudden we had it wrapped around the keel.”

The pole hit the water on the weather side of the bow and was quickly forced backwards, breaking cleanly in half, and pushing the spinnaker down and under the bow in the process. “Maybe approaching the mark so square makes the chute pretty saggy and the sail doesn’t blow around the forestay so cleanly. But really, the jammer was the cause of the problem.”

Alinghi strategist Jochen Shuemann wasn’t so sure: “They obviously pushed it very hard coming in so deep,” Schuemann said. “I didn’t see how it happened but we heard the cracking noise of the spinnaker cloth and then an even louder noise when the pole broke.” He didn’t get a chance to see much more, as tactician Brad Butterworth quickly focused the Alinghi crew on the task at hand. “Let’s sail our own boat boys,” he called out. “They’re trawling.”

But there was less noise on the Oracle BMW boat. For a team that hadn’t beaten their opponent in the previous five meetings, and had just closed up to an attacking position, the afterguard on USA-76, and in particular skipper Chris Dickson, remained markedly calm and quiet, in the face of such a disappointing turn of events. “I think that everyone at the back of our boat has trawled the spinnaker so many times that they know you don’t actually improve things by yelling,” Burns said. “But everyone on board knows what to do in that situation. You know the knives were drawn pretty quickly and we cut it free as fast as possible.”

For Alinghi, the disaster on board USA-76 meant some breathing room. They used the advantage to open up their biggest lead of the race on the second weather leg, rounding the top mark at the halfway point of the race with a 52-second lead. Oracle BMW closed up again on the second run, but Alinghi held on, covering well, rebuilding the lead on the weather leg and rounded the third top mark approaching the finish line 48-seconds to the good.

But approaching the layline for the finish line, Alinghi nearly suffered a similar disaster that could have handed the race back to Oracle BMW Racing. “On the last run the gennaker sheet went under the bow,” Alinghi trimmer Simon Daubney said. “The guys worked pretty fast to get it under control. It's tricky to gybe with an asymmetrical spinnaker and it's easy for the sheet to drop over with the gennaker up. It's happened in training a few times and it can be a problem sometimes when you have the pole so far aft as we did. It was at the crossover between using a spinnaker and a gennaker. At that point it is pretty easy for the sheet to drop over.”

“It was a little lazy mistake that we lost one sheet on that gybe before,” Schuemann explained. “When we started gybing, the call came back to us in the afterguard that this sheet was under the bow. So when you see it before the gybe, it’s no big deal you can hold (off from gybing). There’s a little more drag with the line in the water, but no big problem. But if you don’t see it (and you continue the gybe), it’s a disaster.”

Again, it was Brad Butterworth who neatly summed up the situation. “That just shows you how easily it can all go (terribly) bad.” In the event, the Alinghi crew recovered quickly, and was soon able to gybe for the finish line, going on to win the second race to take a 2 – 0 lead in the best-of-nine Louis Vuitton Cup Final.

The Oracle BMW Racing crew will have a day off from racing on Tuesday, no doubt thinking about opportunities lost before Race Three, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.

Source: Louis Vuitton Cup

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