AC34: Artemis capsize, a tragic loss of a young sailor’s life on San Francisco Bay today

British double Olympic medallist Andrew Simpson was trapped in the wreckage of the @ArtemisRacing AC72. Adam Fisher at Wired.com has a few details on what happened today. If Fisher is correct, this accident was not a repeat of the Oracle AC72 capsize:

(…) Preliminary reports indicate Artemis’s boat didn’t capsize because the sailors were pushing too hard or made a mistake, as was the case with Team Oracle. The problem was with the boat itself, either faulty engineering or faulty construction. The boat simply broke apart under sail, folded, then flipped. The Artemis boat has had a history of cracking and problems with the carbon fiber used in the twin “beams” — the two girders that lash the two narrow hulls together. The boat had been in and out of the shed numerous times in an attempt to correct those problems. Today, however, the forward beam — the girder in front of the sail — gave way during a practice run. The two hulls, no longer connected, began sailing in slightly different directions. This caused one hull to snap just forward of the aft beam, and the mast, held up by high-tension rigging connected to the front of the hulls, simply fell over. The boat began to cartwheel, ultimately trapping Simpson underneath and drowning him.  

Following the October 2012 Oracle capsize Adam Fisher wrote an after-action report The Boat That Could Sink the America’s Cup, which includes commentary arguing that the AC72 rule is too expensive, the design too dangerous.

(…) It’s a question that the other teams — Luna Rossa, New Zealand, and Artemis — are asking themselves now. Paul Cayard, CEO and tactician of Artemis Racing, has plenty of experience with the tricky conditions in San Francisco Bay. His prediction: At least one of the teams is going to capsize again. “It will be a miracle if we get through the summer without it happening to somebody,” he says. “We’re going to start pushing harder, we are going to race, and those kinds of boats — catamarans — tip over.”

The real unknown, he says, is whether the damage caused by the Oracle crash was, as Coutts argues, an exception, a bad accident compounded by severe tides — or something closer to the norm when an AC72 capsizes in the rough waters of the bay. “The Oracle capsize is a bit of an anomaly,” Cayard says. “But it could happen again.” Oracle and Artemis have a full contingency plan — a second complete boat. New Zealand has just a single complete boat and some spare parts. Prada is the most vulnerable, because it has only one boat. “If Prada did what Oracle did closer to June,” Cayard says, “they’d probably be out of the competition.” A $50 million effort (perhaps more), completely sunk.

 (…) But the most telling thing I heard while visiting the repair shop came from Coutts, the CEO. I asked him what would happen to the radical new wingsail design after the Cup was over. “No matter who wins,” Coutts said, “they are definitely going to make changes: make the boat smaller, bring the team budgets down, stuff like that.” In other words, the CEO of Team Oracle now acknowledges that the AC72 is an overreach. 

UPDATE 21 May: a NZ Herald piece back on 11 May contained an October 2012 quote from Russell Coutts that we have never seen:

…In an interview with the Herald in October, the four-times America’s Cup winner said: “In hindsight, I think there were two errors. One was I thought the boats needed to be quite large-scale to be grand enough for the America’s Cup. Clearly the world series has proven this wrong – the AC45s [a scaled-down catamaran class] look pretty damn good on TV. The other thing is, we possibly should have looked at making more of the components one-design.”

Also, for perspective on the dangers of top-level sailing, it is a useful reminder to look again at the 1995 sinking of Australia One. The Aussie sailors were lucky in that recovery – it could very easily have been tragic. And that is in boring old monohulls.

Kimball Livingston: sailing aboard USCGC Eagle

Recently Kimball posted a moving and fascinating personal log of sailing aboard the US Coast Guard 295-ft sail training ship EAGLE. 

(…) Throughout our three-day passage from Portland to the Golden Gate, the ship received visits from service helicopters and cutters, all eyes out to see the Eagle. Their Eagle. I began to get it. What’s hard to put into words. Eagle is magic.

On our last day out the wind piped up and the old girl was hauling the mail . . .

© Kimball Livingston

We greatly enjoy Kimball’s writing. This piece is a wonderful example, which Kimball has annotated with a number of his original photos. 

(…) Through the Coast Guard Foundation, I met remarkable people. One of them was Lieutenant Commander (soon to be promoted) Alda Seabrands. She was called in for the shouting at a Foundation fundraiser.

Alda had been flying a pollution patrol over Puget Sound (meaning, no rescue jumper), when her helicopter was diverted to SAR. A fishing skiff had capsized, spilling two people into white water. The chopper made the scene quickly, dropped a basket, and one man climbed in. He was hauled aboard and the basket lowered again. The second man put one arm over the edge of the basket, then rolled unconscious. Alda told her copilot, “It’s all yours, Binky.”

And jumped.

OK, she didn’t exactly say that, and I’m sure the events, however dire and hurried, were more complicated. But Alda Seabrands was flying as Pilot In Command when she, in full awareness, left her post. As a certain Admiral put it to me, “We had to decide whether it was a court-martial or a medal. We decided it was a medal.”

 Just don’t miss it – get on over there.

AC34: CHASE ONE, the Morrelli & Melvin designed high speed chase boat for ETNZ

Chris Salthouse is in charge of M/V CHASE ONE. This is a 58-knot tender that can support the AC72 for 14-hour days without a return-to-base. And, perish the thought, right the AC72 should they capsize.

In the Diane Swintal interview “Chasing the Big Cats: ETNZ’s Chris Salthouse and 1200 Horses” Chris tells the story of the design of CHASE ONE and how this remarkable boat does her job. Excerpt:

Salthouse has carved out another niche with the team, putting him in charge of a pretty cool new toy – he worked with Pete Melvin of Melvin & Morelli Design & Engineering, one of ETNZ’s AC72 designers, to come up with a state-of-the-art catamaran chase boat that meets the daunting task of keeping up with the team’s America’s Cup boat.

“We started with a blank piece of paper, and a budget,” explains Salthouse. “The old Protector boats were great for working with Version 5 boats; they could go all day at 12 or 13 knots. With these big boats, it’s one thing to be able to go fast, but you’ve got to be able to go fast for long periods of time. With the 30-day rule between now and February, the days on the water are going to be long, 12 or 14 hours. If you’re doing 30 knots all the time, you have to have something that’s efficient and fast, with a range capable of being out there all day to support the boat.

“You’ve also got to have a boat big enough to carry all the spares to keep the boat on the water. We can’t keep coming back to the dock, so we have to carry sailmakers, hydraulic guys, winch guys, engineers, designers – all these guys and all the spare parts, like boatbuilding parts, sailmaking parts, wing repair parts, rigging, all that stuff. That’s what drove us to design a catamaran, the need for something fuel efficient and light, something that would go quicker than what we had and could carry more gear.

CHASE ONE was naturally built by the famous Salthouse family yard: Salthouse Boat Builders

AC34: Atemis Racing Navigator Kevin Hall

Michelle Slade interviews Kevin Hall – the head of the Artemis performance-instrumentation team. This excerpt illuminates some of the complexities and tradeoffs associated with the ongoing hydrofoil experiments. There is no free lunch.

(…) You guys don’t seem to be putting much emphasis on foiling – what’s your thinking on that?
KH: I remember being in one of the very early design team meetings and one of the assignments for the performance team was to make sure we were on top of all the things we would want to measure, maybe occasionally have some sailor input. Adam (May) and I are both Moth sailors. At that meeting, [designer] Juan [Kuoyoumdjian] and his team came in and announced that it was clear that if you could get a boat foiling and going straight and fast, there was a little bit less drag so it went faster. We had that discussion a long time ago, but it’s correct. We’re not pursuing it to the same extent that the other teams have because there’s always been the question of control. It’s one thing to get something to fly in a model and it’s another to get it to fly in the real world. Hats off to ETNZ for doing that – really!

Then there are trade-offs after that. You pay a price for generating the lift to be able to fly—that price is the drag—then you pay another price for generating that lift in a way that also gives not active control like we have in the Moth but a form like that you can control as the height/lift/leeway changes. They’ve done a good job of making that fairly self-regulating. For us, we’re not sure that all those penalties are worth it. So while you’ll probably sure you’ll see our boat out of the water a bit, I’m not sure how much.

There’s rumor that foils may be abandoned because of the size of the course.
KH: Even on a really good day on a Moth, you do have to bear away and get up on the foils before get going fast. For that brief time you’re slower than a boat that’s designed to sail through the water traditionally. They may already have worked out that all those little times where you have to heat up after a jibe or bear away [after a tack], maybe that’s too costly. We can kind of tell a little bit what they’re doing when they’re going straight but it’s very hard to have a feel for all the dynamic stuff from faraway. Certainly they [ETNZ] know that.

So far Oracle, Emirates Team NZ and Prada have all been testing foiling. ETNZ has been testing for some time on the SL33 surrogate cats (very effective for learning!) The SL33 is another Morrelli & Melvin design: 

Merry Christmas 2012 from Dorothy and Steve aboard ADAGIO

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Four months in Hobart, Tasmania, six months in New Caledonia and two months in New Zealand is where we spent our time in year 2012.  Please click on the photo to see photos of our year.

Visiting with friends, attending festivals and working on ADAGIO in Hobart was punctuated by the arrival of a special guest, Jeanne Socrates of the sailing vessel NEREIDA, http://www.svnereida.com.  Jeanne found time in her schedule preparing NEREIDA for a single-handed passage rounding her fifth and final of the five great capes and proceeding to Canada, to make a presentation to the Cruising Yacht Club of Tasmania.

As we sailed ADAGIO from Hobart to New Caledonia in May, we were challenged by messy weather as we crossed Bass Strait, where we also encountered the most photogenic Albatross of our journey.    We experienced mostly rough, following seas and stunning rainbows as we crossed the Tasman Sea from Sydney to New Caledonia in seven days.

Weather windows developed every month or so, enabling us to sail to the Isle of Pines several times, and we were especially pleased that we were able to sail from Noumea to Isle of Pines with Dorothy’s sister and brother-in-law aboard in October.  A young humpback whale breached several times not far from ADAGIO, the first that our guests had ever seen.  Another first for them was snorkeling in tropical waters.

In November, our dear friend Eva joined us in New Caledonia for cruising, snorkeling, exploring and culinary exploits.  She crewed for us on the passage from New Caledonia to New Zealand where we experienced the nearly total solar eclipse and celebrated Steve’s 70th birthday.

Our wishes for you in the New Year are for fair winds in your sails and a friendly following sea helping you along on your journey.  Take care of yourselves and please contact us from time to time with news of your adventures.  We love hearing from you.

Dorothy and Steve Darden
s/y ADAGIO
Whangarei, New Zealand
December, 2012

TNZ Russel Green on the new racing rules for 34th America’s Cup

We are very happy to see that the new rules are being jointly developed by all the teams.  Emirates Team New Zealand’s rules advisor Russell Green says that the rule-making efforts are so far successful, achieving the goal of “simplicity provides certainty“. This seems to be another example of how the new Americas Cup managment is striving to satisfy the needs of all the competitiors and their sponsors. Snippets from Russel Green:

I’ve just got off a Skype call with the “enemy” – Richard Slater, rules advisor for Oracle Team USA who, like their skipper, is Australian.

(…) The topic was the on-the-water racing rules, known officially as the “ISAF Racing Rules of Sailing America’s Cup Edition”.

Past America’s Cup regattas have been governed by the ISAF Racing Rules with limited changes needed for AC yachts.

Fast catamarans with completely different handling characteristics racing on short courses needed a new approach. A simplified set of rules to suit the cats evolved; they have been trialled at the AC 45 events with progressive improvements and amendments after each event.

A majority of the competitors must approve an amendment, achieved by discussions and negotiations amongst teams’ rules advisors.

The process is cooperative rather than adversarial, with everyone aiming to achieve the same goal – a practical set of rules giving the sailors simplicity and certainty in situations on the race course which often become complex very quickly.

Sailors have to know their rights and obligations instantly. The job of a rules advisor is to ensure there are no gaps in that knowledge, the more complicated and uncertain the rules are, the more difficult this is.

In some respects, such as at the windward mark, the AC rules are radically different from the standard ISAF rules. The sailors have embraced them and they are working well. Many of the changes could well be incorporated in to future ISAF versions of the racing rules.

The big change at the windward mark is that the first boat to reach the three-length zone “owns” the rights to that mark even if the yachts are on opposite tacks. If a yacht is at that point either clear ahead or overlapped on an outside yacht it is entitled to room to round the mark including the room to tack. These rights are lost only if it leaves the zone.

Basic rules such as a port yacht keeping clear of starboard, the clear astern yacht keeping clear, and the windward yacht keeping clear of a leeward yacht remain the same.

Rule 17, prohibiting a yacht which establishes an overlap from clear astern from sailing above its proper course, has been deleted. In match racing this rule has always created arguments about “what is” a proper course, sailors were often in doubt about who was the obligated yacht, and it required difficult subjective calls by umpires. Many contentious decisions resulted. Different tactics apply but the change provides certainty and works well.

Having certainty in the wording of the rules is only part of the story Like all sports there is a need for consistency of interpretation and application of the rules by the umpires. The penalty system and umpiring in this edition of the America’s Cup is also radically different from previous events, but that is a subject for another day…….

 

October 2012: Breaching humpback whales

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With Fred & Margaret aboard we identified a narrow window of opportunity to scoot down to Ile des Pins on Monday October 8. As typical the wind was on the nose 13 to 18 kn, so we decided to motor on starboard engine for a bit to see how the weather developed after sunrise. By around 0900 AM the wind had died to 5 kn on the nose. And so it stayed the rest of the day until we anchored in Kuto Bay, Ile des Pins around 1330 in the afternoon.

A lovely day for a slow trip south — no bashing into head seas, and very little salt water on the foredeck. Then excitement broke out on ADAGIO as the engine was stopped, while Dorothy hailed “Whales breaching dead ahead!”. Steve grabbed the Canon SLR and 300mm longest lens, crossing fingers to see another breach. It was a lucky day – two more breaches were captured on “film”.