That sinking feeling
Emotional skipper vows to fight on
When American Magic spectacularly capsized their AC75 Patriot in the Prada Cup on Sunday, the severity of the incident took a moment to sink in.
It wasn’t the first time the team had tipped over in their America’s Cup preparations, having done so several times in their scaled-down model, as well as once in their first-generation AC75 Defiant.
It wasn’t until skipper Terry Hutchinson noticed how much water the boat was taking on that he realised the vessel might have sustained considerable damage.
Soon after, their chase boat pulled a piece of carbon from the sea and relayed to a crew member that Patriot might have a hole in it.
“That raised everybody’s eyebrows very quickly,” Hutchinson said.
“It was pretty hairball. I was trying to eject out of my spot and we ended up with knives out, cutting ourselves out and making sure the first priority was getting the crew out. Fortunately, we were all out probably within a minute and under the mainsail; it’s unnerving, to say the least.”
Sure enough, the vessel had been punctured in the incident, which occurred as the team rounded the markers to begin the final leg in their race against Luna Rossa — which they looked on track to win.
They were travelling at 45 knots when hit by a strong puff of wind which lifted the vessel skywards before slamming it back down. While the shell of the boat was damaged, American Magic were able to get out several key pieces of hardware with little to no damage.
“The boat, when you look at it in slow-mo, popped quite a wheelie and the leeward foil came out of the water and we got a reasonable amount of the bow out, and when the boat slammed down — it’s fine if it slams flat on its keel, but when you land on the side on a flat panel, basically the structures inside the yacht just guillotined the panel and out it came.
“We ended up with 16 pumps inside the boat, we had the jib wrapped around the hole and we had basically two airplane-style life rafts that we wrapped beneath the bow of the boat, inflated them, and that really stopped the bleeding.
“We were fortunate we got both batteries out of the boat. We were fortunate that all the hydraulic fluid inside the yacht stayed inside the yacht — it’s a closed system. So there’s things that will make getting back on to race course easier for us to deal with and we’re thankful none of that stuff ended up in the gulf.”
However, with the AC75s heavily reliant on technology — much of it inside the hull — the team will have to replace a lot of it, including the foil cant system which controls the foil arms. They have their first-generation AC75 Defiant in Auckland and are expected to take the FCS and other parts out of that to help get Patriot back on the water.
Hutchinson was confident they would be back in time for the Prada Cup semifinals on January 29-31.
“I think if I insisted we race over the weekend, I’d have to manage a mutiny. In all seriousness, it’ll be a big effort to get the boat sailing for the semis and we have a realistic timetable, we have great support from the Auckland maritime boatbuilding community to help us, we’ve had great support from all the teams; everybody has offered up their services to get Patriot back on the water.”