AUCKLAND, New Zealand – The elongated object, 75 feet long with a pointed nose, looks more like a driven spacecraft than a sleek racing yacht.
Raised in the air and surrounded by scaffolding, the object’s two appendages protrude and run down its sides like the long, slender legs of a praying mantis. But it’s not a spaceship or even a large insect: it’s Patriot, the sailing yacht of a team, American Magic, who wants to win the America’s Cup, the most coveted trophy, for the United States.
And Patriot has a big problem.
While American Magic led a race against an Italian challenger in the Prada Cup on January 17, the series that will determine who will challenge Team New Zealand for the America’s Cup in March, Patriot turned around dramatically – effectively pull a wheel when it drove out of the water and then rolled over to its left.
The crash tore a hole in Patriot’s hull, caused crew members to scramble to cut teammates out of their seat belts and prepare his entire syndicate to watch the million-dollar boat sink into the waters of the New Zealand Hauraki Gulf. .
Instead, an accident that could have been fatal – the skipper and CEO of American Magic, Terry Hutchinson, and several crew members were trapped shortly below the fallen sail while the boat was full of water – was merely catastrophic, at least in the races.
Less than a week later, on a quiet Sunday morning, three boat builders rubbed over a giant rag that now covers the hole in Patriot’s hull. Another one, with an arm full of cables, stepped up the scaffolding to proceed with the rebuilding of a sophisticated electrical system more suitable for a Formula One car than a sailboat.
By that time, American Magic was only halfway through its extensive repairs, part of a frantic effort to save Patriot, and his team’s hopes of a victory, even as the competition continued without the American boat. Other teams offered expertise and sent pizza. Fans complemented the team’s coffee tab at a local cafe. And about 70 boat builders, engineers and mechatronics technicians in the team worked shifts to complete the work.
The repairs could easily take weeks without a deadline, Hutchinson said. Instead, they were completed within 11 days. On Wednesday, Patriot’s slim body slipped into the water again for the first time.
This weekend, which lost four races, the American Magic team, which is now a big underdog, will enter the semifinals of the Prada Cup against the Italian Luna Rossa. The first to achieve four victories has a British hunt to win the Kiwis, who won the America’s Cup in Bermuda four years ago.
“We can not be broken, and as long as we want to stay, then that is clear proof of that and the air is the limit,” Hutchinson said of the 24-hour effort to bring Patriot back from the dead.
Patriot overturned in the final race of the day, when American Magic led Luna Rossa out of the final turn. The wind speed suddenly increased and shifted from direction, sending Patriot about 45 knots, more than 50 miles per hour, into the air.
The boat crashed to its left and knocked out the hull. None of the 11 crew members were injured, but the damage discovered after a speedboat scraped a piece of Patriot’s carbon hull out of the water was huge.
“It was a very extreme circumstance that no one could really be prepared for, such a big hole in the boat,” said Casey Smith, who oversees Patriot’s hydraulic system.
Raft devices were used to prevent the boat from sinking as it was full of water. Plans were discussed, reviewed, discarded. Nothing worked, Smith said until a police officer came ‘out of nowhere’ with a 40-foot rectangular raft that wrapped and inflated the crew around Patriot’s hull.
“It was the first time I thought, ‘OK, we’re actually going to save this thing,'” Smith said.
Understanding the work ahead of American Magic once it is saved helps to understand the boat first. The class of boats racing in the America’s Cup, AC75, is a new model that needs every entry to build and race in this year’s competition. The boats not only sail, they fly – provided they can reach speeds of more than 15 knots. As soon as a yacht’s hull rises from the water, all that touches the surface is the two seabeds of the boat – those mechanical, praying mantis-like legs – and an equally thin rudder.
Even the terminology used around the boats has changed to phrases that are more frequently associated with flying. “The pitch, nose up, nose down – they now use exactly the same terminology to sail,” said Mark Orams, a professor of sports and recreation at Auckland University of Technology. There is also a crew post called a flight controller, which is responsible for stabilizing the boat while it is out of the water.
“You can go really fast,” Orams said of the new generation of racing yachts, “but you run a big risk of crashing.”
While an AC75 goes nowhere unless there is wind, all its instruments and functions need power, as the sliding trees move in and out of the water. The hydraulic power that moves or cuts the sails comes from about eight crew members called grinders, who furiously pump hand-turned levers during the race. A lithium battery drives all the other power.
This power system, along with other major controls, was destroyed by salt water when Patriot capsized. The team had parts for all the key components and harvested pieces of Defiance, the prototype of Patriot, to do repairs. The team had to improvise with many meters of connecting cables, said Sean Healey, who worked on Patriot’s electronic reconstruction.
Any changes to the boat, including different cables or the patch for the hole, put Patriot in danger of exceeding the strict weight rules of the competition. To be able to race, the boat must be within 33 pounds of 14,374 pounds, according to Silvio Arrivabene, the team’s design production manager.
Another hurdle that American Magic now faces is any undiscovered flaws in Patriot’s newly rebuilt electronic systems. The tight recovery plan left only a 36-hour buffer for delays, testing, fault identification and recovery, and one or two practice rounds. On Wednesday, a problem with an on-board battery that cut off the power of the boat was briefly resolved on the water during the first sail to the hood of the boat. “Unfortunately, we want weeks to get rid of all these problems,” Healey said. “We just do not have weeks.”
On Wednesday, less than two weeks after he overturned, and about 48 hours before the first Prada Cup match against Italy, Patriot is back in the water. “We held our breath for the first five minutes,” Arrivabene said of the morning weigh-in, “but she’s fine.”
When the boat returned, the patch was adorned with a message of gratitude to the competitors of American Magic – a band-shaped graphic with their flags and the words ‘Thank you’.
All three other teams came to the aid of a sinking Patriot – an interruption to the famous bitter and litigious culture of the America’s Cup, and Team New Zealand released some of its boat builders to the replacement hull section at one of its local facilities.
Patriot, at Waitemata Harbor in Auckland, was given a rope to let the boat climb on his watercraft, standard for a low-wind practice day. Soon the rope falls away and Patriot flies by itself. The yacht sounded on one foil in the air, then both, and then the other as it weaved through the water and struck more than 30 knots.
“She just went where she left off – went fast,” Hutchinson said.