“When you look at our campaign, we probably had the shortest amount of time on the water,” said Trenkle, the President of Dennis Conner Sports. “That was necessitated by cash flow. When we got the money determined when we could begin our sailing program. But that didn’t leave time for problems.”

Team Dennis Conner, representing the New York Yacht Club, finished the Louis Vuitton Cup with a 10-15 record and in sixth place.

On the positive side, Conner’s clan was the only team to move up in the standings from its position at the end of the round robins. TeamDC finished the two round robins in seventh.

There were, however, the problems that Trenkle alluded to. Primary among them was the lack of cash up front. That meant that Team Dennis Conner was one of the last to gear up for Auckland and one of the last to arrive on site, which put them on the back foot from the start.

Then there was the sinking of the team’s second America’s Cup Class sloop, USA-77, off Long Beach, Calif., as the team wound up its training.

The team launched USA-77, a Reichel/Pugh design, in late May and sailed it for less than two months before it sank on July 23. Then a delay in shipping a new bow section for the boat to Auckland meant the team’s primary race boat wouldn’t sail again for about three months.

“We didn’t have the time to give up in September by not having our second boat,” Trenkle said. “We couldn’t even sail against another competitor because if we wrecked 66, we’d be out of the event. We couldn’t do in house practise. Our programme was just too short to handle that.”

Their sailing programme commenced in earnest last February when they took delivery of USA-66. After just a few days sailing, USA-66’s tune-up time was interrupted when its millennium rig broke.

Uncharacteristic of a Conner-led team, there was some substandard crew work on the water. Helmsman Ken Read’s performance in the pre-start was an Achilles heel. Stars & Stripes rounded a leeward mark without the genoa sheets attached to the sail. As a final punctuation, their spinnaker grazed the last windward mark of their last race.

They were just 21 seconds behind OneWorld at the time, but the penalty for touching a mark is a 270-degree turn, which killed any chance of extending their quarter final repechage match against the rival American team.

It all added up to the earliest exit from America’s Cup competition ever for Conner, the four-time winner.

“I am disappointed in our results because we could have done better,” Conner said. “In the past I’ve had boats that we’ve got the best out of and we haven’t done well. It seems like I always have an excuse, but this time I don’t think it’s the boat.”

The team’s two boats from Reichel/Pugh have been estimated as the narrowest boats in the fleet. Some have said they’re the answer to the question, How narrow is too narrow?

Trenkle is happy with the boats. He thinks there is more potential to be realised, particularly with USA-77. In assessing the beam, he said that there are so many other factors to consider: sails, rig, rudders, keel fins, keel bulbs and bulb winglets.

In the limited time TeamDC had, however, the narrow boats may have been too radical.

“We weren’t interested in doing something average,” said Jim Pugh of San Diego-based Reichel/Pugh. “We were trying to push the limits of what we can achieve in terms of low drag, which in turn may come with other problems. The boats are very hybrid boats. It’s relatively difficult to maximize their performance.”

While this is the earliest exit from competition for Conner, something Trenkle writes off to the format of the event, it also marks another shortcoming for the New York YC.

The venerable club that began the event had won it for 132 consecutive years before Conner lost it to Western Australia’s Royal Perth Yacht Club in 1983.

Since then the New York Yacht Club has fielded three challenges, 1987, 2000 and this year. Each time it has failed to make the Louis Vuitton Cup semi finals.

Coincidentally, its last two challenges have had one of their boats sink (USA-77) or nearly sink (Young America’s USA-53 in 1999).

“From the New York Yacht Club’s point of view, it was a good marriage with TeamDC,” said Past Commodore Charles A. Dana, III, who was instrumental in forming the alliance with Conner’s challenge.

“The sinking of 77 hurt more than we thought, but I don’t think the America’s Cup has ever seen preparation ahead of time like this,” Dana said.

As for Conner returning with an unprecedented 10th syndicate, that depends on two things, where the next Cup is held and how much money he can raise up front. As he has said, money doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have it up front and don’t spend it wisely.

“I think he’d like to come back, but the problem is you have to look and see if there’s good reason to come back,” said Trenkle, who has been a part of every Conner campaign since 1980. “He does it for a lot of reasons: Because he wants to win, because he enjoys the camaraderie, the team work, being part of the event. And so he has to see whether he can achieve those goals and how hard it is to achieve any one of them. Obviously, you’d like to achieve them all.

“He’s been a big part of the America’s Cup and it’s hard for him to think of sitting out,” Trenkle said.

Source: Sean McNeill