A Cup Of Tea For Courageous

Although it started in earnest more than a year ago, it seems just yesterday that the 23rd challenge for the America's Cup began. By last November at Kullavik on the edge of the Kattegat, while young swans still wearing the gray-brown mantle of immaturity winged south, the small, brittle Swedish boat Sverige was in full flight. In the same month, in Marblehead, Mass., on the leading edge of one of the coldest North American winters of this century, crewmen were picking ice off the rigging of the old American hull Courageous and the new Independence. Before the winter was done, off San Diego, Enterprise, another new American boat, and her stablemate Intrepid were loping over easy Pacific swells, in weather often too balmy and easy for their liking. Meanwhile, half a world away, the crew of the new 12-meter Australia was getting up at godforsaken hours, hoping for a touch of light wind before the hot desert interior of Western Australia began sucking in the cool air off the Indian Ocean at a rate of 20 knots or more.

In the 19 years since the America's Cup was first contested in the class, 24 12-meter hulls have been built for the purpose of challenging for it or defending it. In this, the seventh challenge of the 12-meter era, 13 of those hulls still played a part, as prospective challenger or defender, as stablemate or as inept donkey of explicit purpose. Count them: Gretel II, Southern Cross, Australia, Sverige, Columbia, Constellation, France, France II, Independence, Courageous, Mariner, Enterprise and Intrepid.

The draw of manpower for this challenge was comparable. In a tabletop at Seaview Terrace, the Newport mansion that housed the Enterprise syndicate, there are impressions of miniature 12-meter hulls in various situations. Halsey Herreshoff, summoned at the last minute to help Enterprise's sagging chances, bore down too hard with his pencil while diagramming tactics with Bill Cox, who skippered the unsuccessful U.S. boat American Eagle in 1964. To help sharpen their starting tactics, Enterprise had also called in Tony Parker, runner-up three straight years in the Congressional Cup, the world's foremost match-racing event. To abet her campaign, Sverige's connections early on asked John Albrechtson, Olympic champion in the Tempest class, to take the helm of their trial horse, the old U.S. defender Columbia . (Tapping Albrechtson for such a second-string job is like asking Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of your rumpus room.)

Such fine talent, such an array of handsome boats, and suddenly, in a matter of a week in September, the contest had been distilled to its essence, a defender, Courageous, against a challenger, Australia . On the eve of the first race last week, Gary Jobson, the 27-year-old tactician of Courageous, threw himself down on a crewmate's bed and discussed the upcoming contest with deflating candor. "Unfortunately, the races you are going to see aren't going to be like the races you have seen all summer between Courageous and the other American boats," he said. "The starts are going to be boring, because both boats are going to try to be aggressive but won't get with it until less than five minutes before the gun. They will end up luffing and probably go off with one safely leeward, or on split tacks. Then in the first leg of the first race, they are just going to sit, sorting each other out."

Speaking specifically of his skipper, Ted Turner, Jobson continued, "Ted loves to be ahead and to leeward, working the boat up to windward. On the first windward leg, you'll probably see a few token tacks thrown in, and one boat will develop a 25- to 50-second lead at the mark. The reaching legs will be standard—reach-reach, and Courageous will gain on the reaches whether she is ahead or behind. She will make better roundings because she doesn't have a detached trim tab. If Courageous is ahead on windward legs, she will sit right on Australia's air, and Australia will probably eat too much of it. If Courageous is behind, she will tack off immediately, and the boats will split, with Courageous covering a lot from behind. At the end of the leeward leg, if Courageous is ahead, she will be at least 20 seconds farther ahead at the finish. If Australia is ahead by no more than 30 seconds, Courageous may catch up. It's as simple as that."

The first three races of the series came to pass pretty much as Jobson had forecast: two boats behaving too cautiously before the start and too proficiently to be truly exciting. Pure excellence merits applause but in the America's Cup the spectators are held so far at bay that they could scarcely appreciate the show if it included a high-wire act by trained baboons in the upper shrouds.

In the opening race Courageous had a running backstay block fail. In the second race Australia trailed a few square yards of jib in the water for about 10 seconds, and Courageous had about 15 seconds of grief with a spinnaker that did not come unstopped readily. That was about the limit of the unexpected. In the first race, as Jobson suggested they might, the two boats started on split tacks with the advantage to Australia , but within 20 minutes, operating out of his preferred leeward position, in a boat that unquestionably can point higher, Turner inched up to windward and tacked over to starboard, forcing Australia to tack under him. And as forecast, Australia sucked too much gas before turning away.

The first race was in moderate air, never below 12 knots and pushing 16 only toward the end of the last leg. In that range it was obvious that Australia was the stiffer boat but, for all of it, not capable of pointing as well. On the first windward leg, Australia stuck with a jib that her Skipper Noel Robins in post mortem confessed was wrong. On the same leg, with the finesse she showed in the U.S. trials. Courageous twice changed headsails in such slick style that few observers in the privileged spectator fleet a quarter mile behind were aware that she had. (In the selection trials, she once changed five times on a single leg.) Building on a fat one-minute lead at the end of the first leg, Courageous won by one minute, 48 seconds.

In the second race, started in light wind that soon climbed into the middle range, it looked for the first 20 minutes as if Australia might work out into a solid lead and make a slam-bang battle of it. Eighteen and a half minutes into the first leg, Courageous could not cross with starboard rights and so had to tack under her rival, safely to leeward. In another five minutes, working to windward, Turner-style, she was able to cross over Australia . From there until the second windward leg it looked like an easy test for Courageous, but Australia came back, wiping out a half minute of a two-minute, 38-second deficit to windward, and another minute on the leeward leg. Covering quick tacks flawlessly and long tacks both ahead and on top, Courageous managed to control Australia completely on the last leg to win by one minute, three seconds.

Because of her good performance in light air against her prospective challengers this summer—notably the very light Sverige—and because she weighs 1,000 pounds less than Courageous and has greater sail area, it was thought Australia would do her best in easy winds, but in the third race, held in a six-to-nine-knot range, she did her worst, losing by two minutes, 32 seconds.