Full Sail Ahead

Building a better 12-meter racing yacht for the America's Cup is a bit like trying to reshape Raquel Welch. A naval architect can trim her here, pad her there, but what counts in the end is how well all the parts move together. Last week, after years of designing and testing, the three U.S. contenders for the 1970 America's Cup showed their shapes in public in a five-day series of trial races. Snub-nosed and broad-beamed, none would win a yachting beauty contest. Yet once they were under sail, all their parts seemed to conjoin in swift, sleek harmony.

Most of the time, that is. The preliminary trials are a time for making mistakes, a time to work out the kinks in boats and boatmen. In the opening races between the brand-new Valiant and the refurbished Intrepid, there were kinks aplenty. On the second leg of the first race, for example, Valiant was threatening to take the lead when her genoa jib ripped. In the next race, Valiant was troubled by the wash from the 125-boat spectator fleet, a faulty backstay and a spinnaker sheet that snapped with a sharp bang, causing the sail to flap wildly until the crew could wrestle it down. During a race against Heritage later in the week, Intrepid's spinnaker halyard jammed, and she had to limp along like a wounded bird until a crewman was hoisted aloft in a bosun's chair to free the flapping sail. The breakdowns and the occasionally sloppy crew work made it exceedingly difficult to assess any of the boats' chances. Yet at week's end Valiant appeared to have a slight edge over Intrepid, while Heritage trailed far in their wakes.

Hard fought though they were, the preliminaries have little bearing on which of the three slender sloops will be selected to defend the cup for the U.S. That will be decided in the final trials off Newport, R.I., beginning Aug. 18. Nonetheless, the races afforded yachting fans their first look at the sleek new fleet of U.S. 12-meters. The differences are subtle, for under the restrictive and complex formula for the 12-meter class,breakthroughs are carefully measured in inches and ounces. The U.S. boats: VALIANT is the early favorite for the simple reason that her designer, Olin Stephens, has already created three 12-meter cup winners--Columbia in 1958, Constellation in 1964 and Intrepid in 1967. His latest design is a beamy, white-and-gold sloop that stretches 63 ft. in length. Broad in her forward sections and slim in the stern, she has been dubbed "the tadpole." Valiant's keel is smaller than the old Intrepid's, her trim tab larger. A Stephens innovation for 12-meters, the trim tab on the aft end of the keel helps to reduce drift to leeward and can be used as an auxiliary rudder in tight turns. Valiant's reverse transom rolls down more smoothly toward the waterline, reducing excess weight in hull and deck. As with Intrepid, Valiant's ten-man crew work their winches below deck, thereby lowering wind resistance as well as the boat's center of gravity. Valiant carries 1,750 sq. ft. of sail, less than usual for a 12-meter. Under the cup formula, the reduced sail area allowed Stephens to build a bigger boat; theoretically, at least, the longer the waterline, the faster the boat. INTREPID should probably be rechristened Son of Intrepid. Designer Britton Chance Jr., 29, has altered the 1967 cup winner so much that it is virtually a new boat. According to one rival designer, Chance "performed a hysterectomy on her keel," radically shortening and reshaping it in an effort to give the boat more "lift" to windward and help it perform better in lighter winds. The bow and stern remain the same, but the afterbody has been made fuller with the addition of plastic molding. Intrepid's center steering wheel has been replaced by two wheels on either side of the cockpit, allowing the skipper to vary his vantage point. In addition to the two-wheel drive, Chance plans to add a lighter boom partly made of a new space-age material called carbon-fiber. HERITAGE is the first 12-meter designed, constructed, sponsored and skippered by one man. He is Charles Morgan Jr., a Florida yacht-builder and an experienced ocean racer. Though his do-it-yourself venture extends to cutting his own sails, he likes to call his 62-ft. 6-in. sloop the "people's boat," a reference to the many Floridians, including Boy Scouts and housewives, who have contributed money for her construction. She is, by Morgan's description, "a big mamoo," beefy in the middle and stubby at the ends. Like the other contenders, Heritage has a deck that is as clean as a dance floor; her rig, says Morgan is "bendy as a buggy whip." Though his ship is distinctly a long shot, Morgan says that nothing is going to stop him from "fulfilling my wildest dream."

Not even his susceptibility to seasickness.

U.S. boats have never been bested in the 119-year history of the America's Cup, but this year's competition from abroad promises to be the stiffest ever. While the American boats have just begun their shakedown cruises, the Australian challenger, Gretel II, has been in the water since February racing against the original Gretel, challenger in 1962.

Though Gretel II has had her problems, at last report she was "finding her groove."

In Europe, seemingly all Gaul has rallied behind L.'Association Francaise pour la Coupe de L'America. Baron Marcel Bich, head of the Paris-based Bic ballpoint pen company, has spent four years and more than $2,000,000 developing his country's first cup contender. He even went so far as to commission Britton Chance Jr. to design a new 12-meter to be used as a trial horse for the challenging French sloop.

Christened France, she is being shipped to Newport to race Gretel II in late August for the right to challenge the U.S. defender in a best-of-seven series beginning Sept. 15. For competitors and spectators alike there is one long, furious summer of sailing ahead.

*L + 2d + V'S -F/2.37; L represents the length of the boat, d the girth difference, S the sail area and F the freeboard. Each factor is determined by complex measurement formulas: each can be varied as long as the final equation does not exceed 39.37 ft.--or 12 meters.

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