34th America's Cup: multihulls!

Inevitably, the "human error" thing gets employed, usually for no other reason then just to have something to blame. I've investigated many accidents over the years and it's always a combination of things or events, but people have to extrapolate the data, which leads to decisions, often with miscalculation and mistakes within them. It's not unusual to find no real mechanical failure or engineering mistake, just materials that exceeded recommended loading for some reason. It easier to put an end to an expensive and exhaustive investigation, by finding something to pin the event on, much more often than not, it's the skipper. Maybe not the right thing, precisely, but an end, so a new beginning can occur.

Yeah, I've just read about the efforts the crew made to get at him. Damn, what a tough way to go - and to have to live with, as a crew member, that wasn't as successful as they'd hoped.

 

I would like to know what went wrong with Artemis but I don't like the breathless screaming at Sailing Anarchy or the judgement I read about anywhere on the web. One thing I think we can all agree on is that none of us on this forum have the full facts on anything in the Artemis camp.

I read that the Artemis designers must be dumb because they load tested the boat without rig loading - well almost any cat can be towed around with its dolphin striker tight - every beach cat is stored and trailed this way.

I then read that the crossbeams had some problems and these were fixed improperly. Maybe the crossbeams had a full skin failure, a slight wrinkle on the top laminate or a non structural fairing moved and cracked. We don't know. One of things we learn with composites is that you can make a part as strong as the rest of the part with good tapers and technique. No stress concentrations if done well. Even dumb me knows this so super smart designers know this much better.

I don't know much about the builders and designers of Artemis but I do know a little about the sailors. If the designers and builders are half as good as the crew then this is one seriously well built and designed boat. I find it hard to believe that such a beautifully built and well sailed boat would not have a great team behind her with every team member a far better sailor or builder than me and probably any one else we read on the web.

So rather than join the lynch mob from Sailing Anarchy we should respect them team who lost their friend and partner and let them let us know what happened when they work it out. When bridges and walkways fall down it often takes months to work out what went wrong. It took years to work out what happened to the Comet aircraft and it may take at least months to work out what happened here. The very little inside knowledge I have is that some in the team are really hit hard by what happened and some members have had family fly in for support. They are not machines and we should reflect that people much better than us at sailing, designing and building have had a terrible failure. We could only have done a much worse job so let's lay off the blame until the dust settles.

 

Sailing Anarchy does have something thought-provoking regarding the Artemis accident on their front page today, toward the end of their item titled 'the right to know'.

excerpt, my bold:

I think in light of all the confusion on the part of the world press, who understandably have had to write something about the accident, the Artemis team ought to have given a better description of what they believed happened two or three days after the first shock of it. There shouldn't be stories writing about pitchpoling if there was no pitchpoling, there shouldn't be references to a deep nosedive if the nosedive was in fact moderate and perfectly normal.

The press/electronic media would then have invented lots of other inaccuracies nonetheless, as they chronically do, but the most responsible elements would have had something better in the way of basic facts, these most recent days.

I agree with how Artemis has otherwise kept silence, as long as that silence serves as protection for Andrew Simpson's family, the teammates, their families and friends against a further barrage of lurid, sensationalist news coverage - of the kind Sailing Anarchy is apparently hungering after.

The ghastly images of how Artemis broke up (my assumption), and the full harrowing details of what the whole team then went through, is a story we have no right to know about. The public does not 'deserve' to know about it either.

The more cameras there were recording the scene, the worse it is, for the affected parties. If you have a dozen high definition angles of a shocking situation then of course you lock those tapes up, and you only show it to the affected parties when they want to see it and you know they are strong enough to see it.

The handful of people most traumatized by this do not have an obligation to be additionally traumatized at this time, in order to satisfy Sailing Anarchy's insensitive and boorish lust for 'openness'.

 

Artemis

I think Artemis Sailing is doing exactly the right thing. The whole team needs time to absorb what has happened and after their grieving(I hope they get 30 days if they want it) then comes the investigation inside Team Artemis and then the decisions. SA should give them a break and so should the rest of us.

 

Yes I agree with Doug. I have been involved in auto racing and tragic deaths due to accidents. In this situation the last thing a team cares about is some random loudmouths opinion on a forum. The team will take care of its people and families, analyze what happened to the n'th degree and move forward. If they choose they may release some details but it will probably be just some general comments. The fact is they don't "owe" the public anything and should not release every little scrap of video and information.

 

Artemis / 34th AC

Stephen Barclay: (from- http://www.businessweek.com/article...n-barclay-on-sailboat-design-and-death-at-sea )

The America’s Cup is the Super Bowl of the sailing world. We have a preseason, the America’s Cup World Series, and playoffs, the Louis Vuitton Cup. If you measure the audience in terms of ratings and spectators, these events stand head and shoulders above anything else in sailing. My role as the chief executive is to conduct those events. The Cup is a medium-size business, employing over 100 people, with tens of millions of dollars a year in revenues and expenses. It’s a bit of a handful to manage.

In recent years, we’ve wanted to put the Cup on a sounder financial footing and make it accessible to people other than the very, very wealthy. To do that, we needed to bring the race in from 10 miles offshore to where people can see it. For the sake of television, the races had to start on time. You can’t have this huge buildup to a race and then have the television saying, “delayed due to lack of wind,” which is a huge problem in sailing.

The answer to these issues was to use a catamaran instead of the monohull boats we’ve traditionally used in the Cup. Catamarans are very fast, can sail in very light or strong winds, and get so close to the shore that fans can hear the sailors talking. But sailing can be dangerous. What we have is the best sailors in the world, and the best designers in the world, pushing the boundaries. Like in all sports, when you put the best out there—be it race cars or skiing, or the Knicks—the best want to win. In those situations, sometimes things go very wrong. We had one of those situations [on May 9].

When the Artemis Racing boat capsized in San Francisco Bay, I heard about the accident about 10 minutes after it happened. I was immediately shocked. We heard one of the sailors was missing—followed by elation that they’d found him. That elation rapidly drained away as I became aware he was undergoing CPR. Thirty minutes later, Andrew Simpson (above, center, with Olympic teammate Iain Percy) was pronounced dead. It was an enormous loss. The America’s Cup is like a family. Like any family, they bicker and quarrel at times. But everyone is just tragically feeling the loss.

I think it’s far too raw to be able to know the impact of this tragedy on the event and on the boats. I don’t want to prejudge anything. Andrew was a huge competitor. He had an Olympic gold medal. He had the brains to go with the brawn. He will help us come up with an answer. — As told to Aaron Kuriloff

 

Andrew "Bart" Simpson

from Scuttlebutt tonight:

Artemis Racing today held a private ceremony commemorating the memory of our friend and teammate Andrew "Bart" Simpson. After eight bells, a wreath was cast upon the water by representatives of the four teams of the 34th America's Cup. Then the morning's rain parted and sunshine spread across San Francisco Bay. The Artemis Racing team thanks everyone for their support. Bart, may you rest in peace. (emphasis by dl)

 

Artemis AC 72 blue (second version)

If Artemis goes grieving for 30 days they will lose . They did not sail yet with the Blue AC 72. It will be different and it is said foiling. The new team needs to be accostumed to that before LVC begins. 47 days to go.

 

...

Patrizio Bertelli of Luna Rossa is not at all comfortable with the hell-for-leather latest developments in the AC72's, see this gurgle-translate of an interview with him yesterday in La Stampa..

To the final question 'What about Oracle?', Bertelli replies:

"They planned the selection trials of the challenger, the Louis Vuitton Cup, from July to August, in a period when the bay of San Francisco is very windy. The final of the America's Cup, however, is in September, when there is an average of 15 knots. They (Oracle) are there to watch us get massacred, smash everything and wait. No, we will not do it/agree to it. "

...

Separately, the review committee's first meeting has resulted in them asking teams to refrain from sailing both the '72's and '45's for another week.

I hope they will ask the teams, among other things, to examine and reveal if any of them have the slightest reason to doubt the solidity of their beams and beam connections.

Today I met a good sailing friend who was eager to talk to me about the 'Artemis capsize'. But I told him that I thought this was not at all a capsize in the regular sense, but something quite different and far more wicked.

 

Please, they're not going to reveal any such thing and would be foolish to do so. "Hi, I have a cutting edge racer and I doubt the structural integrity of the assembly" . . ., yeah, that's going to happen.

Of course Patrizio Bertelli doesn't like the venue. He just wishes he'd been in position to place his competition in this situation, which he would have done in a heartbeat had he the opportunity. He's a bit whinny any.

Look folks, the teams will likely give a few more days to the respect of Bart and the committee's request, but I doubt it'll be a week, just too much to do and learn and way too much to lose if they sit around with their thumb up their butts.

 

In light of what happened with Artemis, I'm sure they have a different understanding of what would be foolish.
Bertelli and Dalton probably have a good communication... and then there is Artemis, who may have reservations we don't know about.
That's the extent of the teams involved, PAR. I have no better knowledge than what I read in the papers. It will be interesting to see what happens.

 

To some extent, the response of all of the teams will probably be highly dependent on determination of the cause.

Now I am not saying that they will admit the above and I am not saying that the public will get the same version of "the cause" that the sailing teams get.

If they figure out it was just a fitting failure on a stay, the desire to compete will suddenly start to be compelling.

If it was something more far reaching and a real overall concern, hesitation and second thoughts are more likely to be widespread.

I am betting it is more of the former.

For the above, I was just discussing the actual on the water part of the teams. Up at the top, the people that matter are probably just wanting to get on with it and/or all wrapped up in politics and posturing. I do not see any big desire for change from the top at Oracle or ETNZ. As such, the pressure to move on will be heavy on the other two teams.

In my opinion, some amount of change to reduce accident probability and to improve accident response capability is:

• Warranted as long as it does what it is supposed to do
• A good "cover your bottom" tactic
• Needed to appease a certain crowd
• Not really worth fighting
• Unlikely to really matter given that politics will probably get in the way of doing anything that really makes sense
• Likely to cause lots of fussing one way or the other

 

34th AC

From the AP tonight:

ALAMEDA, Calif. (AP) — The owner of the Italian entry in the America's Cup said Friday his boat will compete in this summer's races after all, but he suggested a new precaution.

Speculation has swirled over whether Luna Rossa Challenge would pull out of sailing's most prestigious event after a sailor on another crew died during a training run on San Francisco Bay.

Patrizio Bertelli, who also is the chief executive of fashion house Prada, last week told European media he was concerned about the safety of the high-tech boats specially built for the America's Cup.

Standing in front of his multimillion-dollar racing yacht in Alameda on Friday, Bertelli said he would like to see races canceled if winds on the San Francisco Bay were deemed too dangerous.

 

Standard fair from a light air design owner, knowing how it'll fair in some chop. This isn't a new thing and I've heard this countless times, from other contenders over the years, trying to compensate for their design choices. He could care less about the safety issue, so much as the ability of his boat, to do well against other designs. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure he does care, but this isn't why he invested in the yacht and that is the real issue.

It would be nice if these "ocean racers" where actually forced, to make a 500 mile passage before they'd qualify for the various events. Then much of the bickering about wind strengths and flimsy structures would be eliminated, plus they could actually be called ocean racing yachts, instead of the finicky, temperamental, near shore machines that they actually are.

 

Its common practice to cancel or delay the start of a race due to weather conditions.

If the yachts are designed for 15 knots then this should be the criteria