Dealing with a 64m mast

Alinghi's Brad Butterworth airs his views on maxi-multihulls and the 33rd America's Cup

If you spent the last 20 years or so earning a name for yourself as a leading America’s Cup tactician, then moving to a Deed of Gift match race - aboard boats where manoeuvring is costly and a gale force wind from one direction is the feature of the upwind leg - is perhaps not your first preference. Despite his position in the afterguard becoming slightly less critical aboard a 90ft long monster multihull, Brad Butterworth is maintaining a brave face when we theorise with him over the 33rd America’s Cup.

An America’s Cup legend, who aside from his role as tactician jointly runs Ernesto Bertarelli’s Alinghi team with one time Australia 2 navigator Grant Simmer, Butterworth says he will certainly be in the afterguard on their new multi. “I want to sail on the boat definitely. Even if I say - ‘okay, we’re going this way for 20 miles! They will be big boats and tacking will be expensive and you’ll see the boats being sent in different directions - it is more of a Nascar event. But it is still about design and sailing.”



Butterworth warns that the sailing public will be in for a shock when the new boats are finally unveiled. “I don’t think anyone really envisages what they’ll see with these boats when they are launched in terms of the size of them and the power of them and the speed of them. It will be something that hasn’t been seen before. The multihull fraternity hasn’t had this much money thrown at it for a while. As a yachtsman who has come through Cup cycles, you see what happens when these Cup teams get behind a new rule: A lot of resource gets put into designing these boats to the nth degree. Everything is custom designed. It will be quite spectacular.”

He is almost certainly stirring, but according to Butterworth the rumour is that the rig on the BMW Oracle multihull will be 64m (209ft) tall – bear in mind that this will be on a 27.4m (90ft) long platform. One suspects that this may be exaggerating the case, but we can certainly expect skyscraper rigs in some form. Butterworth warns that to simply get the mainsail on board you’ll need a crane. “They are huge, powerful boats.”

But while the boats individually will be spectacular, he reckons the racing between them will be boring. “I think it is going to be two very different boats starting and one boat will be dominant and will probably sail away. It will be boring. It will exciting from the point of view of the size of the boats and the loads. But the racing - I wouldn’t stay up to watch it. Tactics might come into play - it will be interesting to see how both teams sail the boats.”

Surprisingly, given that his role on board is likely to be less vital than on a slower monohull, Butterworth, controversially, wonders whether after a Cup in multihulls the event will go back to monos. Is he trying to second guess what he thinks his opponents will do if they win? “I think it is up to the guys that own the teams to make that call. These boats are not cheap and this is an expensive regatta with just two teams. And you build one of these boats and I don’t know why you’d bother going back to something that is going to be slower. Everyone liked the multi-team event within the Darsena – it has been special, but maybe it won’t happen again for a while.” These comments that will not doubt send shudders through other teams hoping that one day they might get an opportunity to challenge.

As to the Deed of Gift match itself, Butterworth thinks it is ludicrous that these enormous, expensive boats will be allowed to sail a maximum of just three races. “It should be seven races. If you are going to all this trouble - why don’t we race more races?” So has that email been fired off to Russell Coutts? “I’ll talk to him next time I see him. There hasn’t been any mutual consent yet. But now things are more settled than they have been over the last few months...”

Obviously a huge amount of the outcome of the 33rd America’s Cup – and many believe the final outcome - will depend upon what happens in the court in New York. The most vital piece of information awaited from here will be the date of the event. As previously reported, Alinghi, being behind in their preparations for a big multihull (design work only started at the end of November and Ernesto Bertarelli only very recently agreed to press the button for the build to go ahead definitely) feel it would be impossible to get their new boat ready this year and would like the next event to take place in 2009. Much further advanced, BMW Oracle Racing are gunning for 2008.

So what would Alinghi do if the courts deem that the event is to be held this year? “Forget it,” says Butterworth. “I don’t know what Ernesto will do then. But it won’t be a regatta of two big multihulls. It’ll be a waste of time. They either do it next year and have a regatta or it will be a mismatch, a disaster. You physically can’t build a boat and get it ready to go this year. It is just impossible for us to do it. You are hamstrung by the legal ramifications - that the order still hasn’t been given over the yacht club - so basically you can take a punt and start building this boat, which is what Ernesto has agreed to do, but there is still a lot of uncertainty out there which is crazy.”

On the topic of the sailing itself, the team have recently employed the all-American John Barnitt, originally part of the team when they were in Auckland and previously a long standing Dennis Conner crewman, including, usefully, during the 1988 Cup when he spent most of his time sailing the solid wingsail cat. Soon the sailing team are to divide up with some sailing with Ed Baird on the iShares Cup, others including Murray Jones with Ernesto Bertarelli on the D35 circuit in Switzerland. They will also return to Lorient when, following her capsize, Alain Gautier’s Foncia is back on the water with her spare rig at the end of June. It is likely, as BMW Oracle have already done, that they will go two boating in ORMA 60s.

So why, given that the 33rd America’s Cup is most likely to be in 90ft long multihulls, a sailing discipline a million miles away from V5 Cup boats, have they not employed a posse of French life-long multihull experts to crew their boat, instead relying on their existing sailors, most of whom were with them for the 32nd AC? “We are hoping to get the guys up to speed sailing multihulls,” explains Butterworth. “The guys that are in this part of the sport are professional sailors. They know how to sail boats and they know how to adapt themselves to different codes of the sport. We have a lot of multihull experience in the team, so I think we are going to wind up with a good cross section. We have brought in people that have had years of experience like Alain [Gautier] and others, but these guys that have been doing the Cup for years, they are pretty good sailors. They will work it out I think.”

While it is a little early to say, Butterworth reckons the new breed of 90ft multis will be sailed by a crew of more than 20 so there is every possibility that some specialist skill could be brought in at a later stage if it was deemed necessary. “We’ll be going out there with the best multihull sailors we can get.”

So as a sailor is he excited by the prospect of racing big multihulls? “I am getting more excited now because Ernesto has committed to do it. Up until a month ago we didn’t have the go ahead on building the boat, so it is going to happen.”

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