|
Related: Read the ETNZ side of the story here Auckland, February 3, 2009
Two teams. Four boats. That’s what was needed to support an expanded Louis Vuitton Pacific Series. To make the popular match racing regatta a reality, BMW Oracle Racing answered the call from LV's Bruno Troublé to join Emirates Team New Zealand and bring their two Version Five yachts to New Zealand for the event. Step one was getting the boats out of containers in Valencia. Step two was marshalling the shore crew to put the boats on the water for the event and keep them there. For BMW Oracle, both jobs came down to Grant Davidson. Davidson, known among the team as “Guthrie,” manages shore crew and logistics for the American team –- a job that has a extra demands in the Louis Vuitton Pacific Series. Providing two race-ready Cup yachts on short notice on the far side of the world wasn’t smooth sailing, so to speak. “It was a bit of an epic,” admits Davidson. First up was the task of taking two yachts that had been completely stripped of gear (electronics, hydraulics, winches, everything), getting them out of mothballs in Valencia and into containers and onto a ship bound for Auckland. Thanks to Louis Vuitton, who got the boats to New Zealand, and Shosholoza’s Salvatore Sarno whose MSC shipping line carried them, early December saw the arrival in Auckland of the second pair of the LVPS fleet. Several team members went to Melbourne to help the transfer the containers to another MSC ship bound for Auckland. Captain Sarno held one of his ships in Melbourne for three days, waiting for the BMW Oracle containers to arrive –- and keeping a ship in port is not inexpensive. If he hadn’t held the ship, the containers would not have made it to Auckland in time.
Once in Auckland, 27 members of BMW Oracle’s shore team, some of them pulled from the trimaran project, put the yachts back into VLC configuration. ”The designers had all the information from the last Cup, so they put forward the best configuration onto the boats to even the odds,” explained Hamish Pepper, BMW Oracle tactician. It made the so-called “standardization” relatively easy. The team put USA-87 back together to match US-98, giving both boats the same bulb and keel packages. “They’re not exactly equal,” said Davidson, “not exactly perfectly matched, but they’re as close as we can get them. On a short course like this, there’s just not that much difference.” “We haven’t seen any difference, we’d be happy to sail any of the four boats,” said Pepper. “For the sailors, there are differences in positions of gear, like winches and pedestals and wheels. The structure down below is different, they’re two different concepts, but they’re pretty even at the end of the day. We were quite impressed with the [ETNZ] boats, they did a nice job with the deck layout, they really thought about the details.” Pepper, tactician for New Zealand in 2003, recognized some Kiwi design DNA in the 2007 generation NZL boats. “We worked in 2003 at Team New Zealand to design the boats to be uncluttered, to make sure things had a dual purpose, and they’ve continued that.” Davidson believes that the ETNZ and BMW Oracle boats are among those at the top of the technology and design ladder, with the ETNZ boats similarly tweaked out with “all the same little gadgets our guys have figured out over the years.” Consequently, the other teams are seeing a range of things they likely didn’t have on their own boats. For the long-standing teams, figuring out where things are when they’re not where you expect them to be can be confusing. Once the regatta began, Davidson’s job took on new meaning, overseeing a team of 15 people on the floor to repair any damage to his boats in the course of being raced by teams that are either not used to their layouts, or team that have very limited Cup experience at all. Now instead of just waiting for his own team’s sailors to return after a hard day of sailing so that his “day” can begin, Davidson knocks on wood hoping that the teams who sail the BMW Oracle boats return them in one piece. “It’s really like a one-design regatta with multiple teams using different boats,” says Guthrie. “There are all sorts of little things that can break down –- like when the guys get an override, they cut the sheets, which are expensive on these boats. Or during string-line drops they wind the rope until it breaks the spindle system down below. So far, it’s just been a lot of little maintenance items. “At this stage of the game, all the guys are being pretty respectful of the boats. They know that if something goes wrong, it all goes wrong, that everything will get delayed. We don’t want the round robins to be cut short because one boat’s out of action.”
As has been seen over the years, there are any number of things that can break on one of these boats, sometimes in spectacular fashion. China Team broke a spinnaker pole on Day One and virtually exploded a spinnaker on Day Three. Luckily, these were items that can be fixed overnight with relative ease, but they’re also items that have few backups. “We have one spare mast per boat,” says Davidson, “and six poles total. Three have been broken already. Every time we repair a spinnaker pole, it becomes a little heavier and harder to maneuver but they do become stiffer and stronger, so if they break again it will require a little more force to break it. “We can change a lot of things in a night and make sure the boat’s ready to go the next day, but the major damage is collisions and everyone hopes that doesn’t happen. “But when the guys see that it’s going to be 20 or 22 knots, they think ‘Oh, it’s gonna be a long night.’ “ So far, the early rounds robin have been relatively calm for the BMW Oracle team, with just minor maintenance items to fix each night -- aside from the whopping 35-man hours required Sunday to repair China Team’s completely blown spinnaker -- but they know it will become more difficult as the regatta progresses. “When the heat comes on later in the regatta, the boats will be put through their paces. The turns will be harder, the gybes will be louder, the intensity lifts another notch. That’s when the boys will be thinking ‘Let’s get the sleeping bags out.’”
-- Reporting by Diane Swintal for CupInfo/©2009 CupInfo Links of Interest: Also see: ETNZ Readies Yachts for LVPS: Talking with Andy Nottage Visit the Official LVPS Web Site |
