Angry Australians

The Daily Sail speaks to Damien Smith, designer of the Australian challenger for what was supposed to have been the Little America's Cup

'Highly upset' would be the polite way of describing the feelings of the Australian Catamaran Challenge at present. Over the course of the last two years they have been developing a new generation of C-Class catamaran with which they intend to challenge the US holder of the Little America's Cup, Steve Clark's Cogito.

Clark is up for the match. The Australians have spent $70,000 on their campaign to date. They were even told by the Sea Cliff Yacht Club's Trustees of the International Catamaran Challenge Trophy (the official name of the Little America's Cup) that their challenge was acceptable, only to be informed subsequently that it was not and that the Trustees had seen fit to alter the Deed of Gift, turning the Little America's Cup into an F18 series. Understandably the Australian syndicate are furious...

"It is just revolting," Damien Smith, designer for the Australian Catamaran Challenge told The Daily Sail. "If these guys don’t have the metal to defend the trophy they should have mailed it to us in a box when we challenged. How are you supposed to have a Little America’s Cup in production boats? It is just not what it is about."

The original Deed of Gift, before it being changed, specifically said that the competition for the International Catamaran Challenge Trophy should be in C-Class catamarans, says Smith. "It is against the whole 40 year history of the event...of the Lindsay Cunninghams, the Dave Hubbards, the Austin Farrars that have spent 40 years pushing the edge along. And they are saying “well, we don’t want to do that any more”. It’s a just a complete travesty." Strange - that was the word we used.

Smith is a naval architect working for Austal Ships in Henderson, Western Australia. Two years ago he and another designer who had done his university thesis in C-Class design, teamed up with project head, Ian Jenkins, a doctor and anaesthetist from Perth who is privately backing the campaign.

The boat itself although not launched yet, is not far off. Smith says they have done research into the design of the platform, "it's 25ft long by 14ft wide but as long as the hulls are thin and pointy, there's not much you can do," he admits. "We did do quite a lot of work on that. We ran a lot of models and testing on the hulls and I wasn't able to come up with anything substantially better than the Tony Love design from the Edge III. We have the moulds for those."

The Edge III was the predecessor to the boat Lindsay Cunningham's team unsuccessfully defended the Cup against Cogito in 1996. "They got to the stage with hull shapes where they figured they were about right and didn’t want to change them any more."

They have made a set of hulls and have been out sailing on those with a softsail rig. Running the sailing side of their campaign is Brian Lewis, who was 4th in the Tornado at the 1976 Olympics, but Smith says they are negotiating with some of Australia's best cat sailors to drive it.

Obviously the main effort and the focus of their development has been with the rig. While Smith is unwilling to give too much away he says that their rig is a fully monocoque, twisting, one piece rig - rather than the bi- or tri-plane rigs favoured by Cunningham and Clark. "We have come up with something which we think is an advance on what Steve Clark did in 1996," says Smith. The wing is nearing completion. The rig and platform will undergo an intensive development process once launched. The team then intend to build a second platform and rig which they will use in their challenge.

Some followers of the Little America's Cup say that Steve Clark kicked the event finally into touch when he spent an estimated $500,000 challenging, including the employment of boatbuilders for two years and having his team in Australia for three months. Smith says that their campaign won't cost that much. "Contrary to what people might think about the Little America’s Cup it is not as expensive as you might think. You can only pay so much per kilo for carbon fibre. We also have more volunteer labour."

Back to the thorny issue of their dealings with the Sea Cliff Yacht Club, Smith says that they first made contact with them 18 months ago. "We got a letter January 2002, saying that they would welcome a challenge. My understanding is that the British syndicate which is working on this also had conversations with them in October 2002. At that stage they were still talking about a C-class challenge. We advised them in September 2002 that we would not be ready for Sept 2003, but would be for September 2004."

Then the bombshell came in February when they received notification that their challenge had been rejected. So why did this happen? Smith is mystified. "I think the mighty dollar speaks quite a lot. They have been quite cagey with us. I am not entirely sure why they have done this. We asked the same question - it is just incredulous.

"After they rejected our challenge we got back to them pretty quickly with a detailed letter outlining the money we’d spent to date and the photos of what we’d built to date, including the boat we had on the water with the soft sail and pictures of the wing and pictures of all the people involved in the syndicate." But, it seems, to no avail.

Meanwhile Ian Jenkins has flown to the US and met with Clark. "Steve [Clark] and Duncan [MacLane] have accepted Ian's challenge to sail for...we don’t know what yet, but the title of 'the quickest boat on the planet'," says Smith. "Obviously the Trustees are now desperately trying to secure the rights to the name, Little America's Cup, so that we can’t use it."

The racing between the 'quickest boats on the planet' is to take place in September 2004 presumably off Newport, Rhode Island or in Narragansett Bay. Maybe, as cat veteran Randy Smyth once suggested, the event should be renamed the Fast America's Cup instead.

To see Christian Fevrier's photographic history of the C-class in the Little America's Cup (courtesy of BlueGreen ) click here to see part 1 and here to see part 2.

To read the feedback we have already received on this subject click here .

Feedback: Have the Board of Trustees done the right thing? Should the Little America's Cup be raced in F18s? Give us your thoughts or click here to open a message box.

Below: Another view of the tooling for the solid sail



Test sailing with the softsail rig