Adrian Morgan
CRAFTSMANSHIP
F
oiling catamarans flying silently above the
blue waters of Bermuda. America’s Cup. Pah!
Sally touched 8.7 knots on passage back from
Gareloch last year, under leaden skies, over grey seas.
Now that’s what I call an adrenaline rush.
She’s 79, a prototype Vertue, having been built in
1937, the year the Hurricane came into service, the RAF’s
first monoplane fighter, and a year after they rolled out
the Spitfire. There was something about those late 1930s
that suggests the essence of genius was on the loose.
Frank Whittle fired up the first jet engine while one
Chester F Carlson invented the photocopier. A year or so
previously, for these things all have gestation periods,
Robert Watson Watt patented radar (coincidentally with
the first canned beer and Du Pont’s nylon).
Sally also shares her birth date with the J-Class boats
Endeavour II and Ranger, which fought the last
America’s Cup battle while, as newsreels love to say, “the
dark clouds of war threatened”. Ranger was just too fast
for the Nicholson-designed Endeavour, winning in
straight races. Endeavour’s predecessor, the 1934
challenger, very nearly pulled it off against the slower
Rainbow, thanks to some innovative ideas from Frank
Murdoch, a Hawker engineer and aircraft magnate Tom
Sopwith’s right-hand man. It was Murdoch who, after a
trip to Germany, recommended his boss start rolling out
1,000 Hurricanes, in a hurry, and at his own expense.
With nearly 80 per cent of the recorded kills, the
Hurricane, arguably, saved Britain.
Can you spot the connections? And there are many
more: Laurent Giles, Sally’s designer, studied engineeringat Cambridge and worked under
Charles Nicholson, Endeavour’s
designer. In those days the world of
aircraft and yacht design were
inextricably linked, in a way that is
mirrored today in the world of
foiling cats and wing sails.
For a sail, they tell you, is just a
wing on its ear.
Personally I have never seen
Sally’s mainsail as anything other
than that. I hope I never see it
lying parallel to the horizon. The
forces acting on it may involve
high and low pressure sides, lift
coefficients, and so on, but to me
it is simply a miracle that squeezes
Sally’s four tons more or less into
the eye of the wind. And I like to
leave all that science behind when
I sail. How a boat sails is, like the
old saying, a mystery, one of four
as the Bible tells us: The way of an
eagle in the air; the way of a
serpent upon a rock; the way of a
ship in the midst of the sea; and
the way of a man with a maid.
How Sally, with an overall length of just over 25 feet
managed to get within 0.3 of a knot of 9 knots is,
indeed, a mystery. The best I have ever had, before Sally
had her 75th birthday chartplotter, was around 7 knots
and that seemed the limit. No so; with secretary Paul
Copestake of the (Royal) Loch Broom Sailing Club at the
tiller, under full main and working jib (i.e. too much),
Sally flew past Rudh Reidh lighthouse last September
with astonishing bursts of speed accompanied by the
glorious rushing noise and commotion of mightily
disturbed water. And, the bottom line is, that 8.7 knots
in a Vertue, for me is probably just as exciting as 37
knots flying six feet above the water, which brings us
back to the America’s Cup and foiling cats.
I wonder when speed alone will lose its appeal?
Intriguingly at the same time that Ben Ainslie and his
rivals will be fighting for the right to challenge for the
America’s Cup in Bermuda in 2017, a J-Class fleet, in
fact all the extant Js, including Sopwith’s first Endeavour,
will be in town to provide a backdrop to their flimsy
little dragonfly counterparts. Js can barely manage 15
knots – but oh the sight and sound of those boats!
I am betting that the sight of those huge racing
machines, updated for the 21st century, with carbon
spars and black laminate sails, will blow the spectacle
of foiling cats clean out of the water.
Oh, and 2017 will also be 80 years from the date
Sally II was built.Not to be foiled
Why 8.7kts in a Vertue beats 37 in an AC foiling cat
“I wonder
when
speed
alone will
lose its
appeal?”CHARLOTTE WATTERS
thetroublewitholdboats.blogspot.com