New Zealand Skipper Adapts and Thrives in a Multihull World
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Version 0 of 1. SAN FRANCISCO — Dean Barker has been the helmsman for Team New Zealand in the America’s Cup. He has been the helmsman for New Zealand in the Louis Vuitton Cup. He has raced in the MedCup, the Congressional Cup, the world match-racing championships, even the Olympics. But until October 2010, Barker, one of the world’s most experienced and successful sailors, had never been at the helm or at any other post during a multihull race. “No, no, no, niver, niver, niver,” said Barker, using the true-blue Kiwi’s pronunciation of never. Until Larry Ellison and Barker’s countryman Russell Coutts of Oracle Team USA determined that the 34th America’s Cup would be contested in 72-foot catamarans, AC72s, Barker had never had need or desire to race in a boat with more than one hull. “I did have a Hobie 16, which I had bought a few years before just as a knock-around boat, just to use for the beach,” he said. “But that was just to go out and muck around in.” That came to an abrupt halt in 2010 as Barker flew to Almería, Spain, to compete with his teammates in an Extreme 40 regatta in a catamaran. “We finished dead last and not by a small amount,” Barker said. “We came away from that knowing what was involved and what we needed to do, but we realized it was a pretty steep mountain to climb.” The final phase of the climb begins Sunday with the first round-robin race of the Louis Vuitton Cup in San Francisco. New Zealand, with Barker still at the helm, is a strong favorite to emerge from the disappointingly small group of three challengers and face Oracle in the America’s Cup in September. If that happens, both Barker and Oracle’s helmsman, Jimmy Spithill, will be tributes to the power of adaptation. Spithill, a high-energy Australian, also had to make the transition from the detail-driven world of monohulls to the more wide-open world of multihulls. He did that from 2007, when he was the helmsman for Luna Rossa in the 32nd Cup, to 2010, when, after joining Coutts and Oracle, he was at the helm of the giant 90-foot trimaran that won the 33rd Cup from the Swiss team Alinghi. As the defender, Oracle had the choice of boats and site. “We were seriously considering the monohull,” Spithill, 34, said in a recent interview. “It was a tough choice, and Russell was really good about the process. We started to really think about trying to jump a few steps ahead and really think, ‘What will the next generation want to do?’ And the answer was: ‘They’ll want to go fast. They’ll want to be tested. They’ll want to be right on the limit.’ ” High-performance catamarans it would be, even if the consensus now is that the carbon-fiber boats, with their huge wing sails, are bigger and more powerful than they should be. Their complexity and, above all, cost have also turned out to be dissuasive to prospective challengers. Eleven competed in the last full-scale Cup, in 2007 in Valencia, Spain. The three this time are Emirates Team New Zealand, Luna Rossa and the Swedish team Artemis, which is still trying to launch a viable boat after its first was destroyed May 9 after capsizing in an accident that killed the British sailor Andrew Simpson. New Zealand is the only challenger that has attempted, with Barker, to convert a star helmsman from the previous class of Cup yachts to the AC72s. Luna Rossa and Artemis have brought in new talent from other yachting classes with no previous America’s Cup experience. After extensive trials, Luna Rossa has chosen Chris Draper, a 35-year-old from Britain. Artemis’s primary helmsman is expected to be Nathan Outteridge, a 27-year-old Australian, even though he was at the helm during Artemis’s accident in its first AC72. Draper and Outteridge have won world championships and Olympic medals in the 49er high-performance skiff dinghy: Draper won the bronze in 2004 with Simon Hiscocks; Outerridge won the gold in 2012 with Iain Jensen. Outerridge also won the world championship in the International Moth Class in 2011, and the fact that the Moths do hydrofoil has made him a particularly attractive contender to drive the much bigger foiling AC72s. “There was sort of a whole generation of sailors who missed out on the America’s Cup, when the old guys hung on through the I.A.C.C. class,” said Iain Murray, the America’s Cup regatta director, referring to the monohull class used from 1992 through 2007. “It was a pretty closed shop, and the old guys could hang in there. “Experience was gold, but now it’s all the guys who are coming out and winning gold medals in 49ers and Moths and all these really high-performance boats; guys in their 20s taking up the posts.” There was also the America’s Cup World Series, preliminary events contested over the past two years in one-design, 45-foot versions of the full-blown Cup yachts. Those events were a proving ground for new talent. Draper was initially with Team Korea, which failed to secure the financing to compete in the Vuitton Cup in AC72s. “Without that circuit, I think it was impossible to see Chris Draper or Outerridge in the Cup,” said Max Sirena, the America’s Cup veteran who is the skipper of Luna Rossa. Barker, once a wunderkind but now 41, said he had never considered not attempting to make the transition. “In the end, we’re all sportsmen and we like to compete,” he said, “and I think that new challenge was at times quite refreshing.” The challenge included extensive time on the water in smaller catamarans and a lot of coaching from Glenn Ashby, an Olympic silver medalist in a catamaran for Australia in the Tornado class, who had helped Oracle prepare for the 2010 America’s Cup. “It’s pretty much apples for apples,” Barker said. “There are a lot of skills that transfer straight across straight away.” But there are still big differences, fear factor included. “Well,” Barker said, “we’ve gone from a boat in which finesse and fine-tuning and detailing has sort of been absolutely paramount to a boat where it’s just raw adrenaline and quite big changes in the speed and the trim and angle, where it’s a lot more seat-of-the-pants sailing. And all that pretty much makes the boats all the more fun to sail.” Barker said he did miss the elaborate, intricate prestarts that were a staple of previous America’s Cups in monohulls. “That was a real skill that you need to develop over the years,” he said. “And I do miss going to all the match-racing events and all that sort of racing, the close boat-on-boat battles, because that certainly in this era does not exist nearly to the same level.” What he also misses, with only two other challengers in San Francisco, is depth of competition. “There are just not enough teams, and the budget is still way too high,” he said. “We need teams back in the Cup, and we need to get the budgets down so we can do that.” |