HAMILTON, Bermuda — Sailors have been falling off boats for as long as there have been boats. Even the world’s best are not immune.
With a place in the America’s Cup match at stake earlier this month, Nathan Outteridge, Artemis Racing’s helmsman, slipped off the back of his team’s foiling catamaran and into the aquamarine depths of Bermuda’s Great Sound.
In February, while preparing to defend the cup on the same scenic body of water, Oracle Team USA grinder Graeme Spence went overboard off the front of his boat and hung on to its platform for a moment before being swept under the catamaran perilously close to one of its sharp-edged daggerboards and its two rudders.
“Graeme was massively lucky,” said Tom Burnham, Artemis’ coach.
In both instances, the sailors lost their footing while crossing to the opposite side of the boat, a maneuver that can be tricky in many yachts but is particularly challenging on the high-speed multihulls being raced here. These boats can approach 50 knots (about 60 mph) and can maintain speeds exceeding 20 knots even while tacking — turning while sailing upwind.
“The layman or standard sailor has no idea of what it’s like to go across a boat like this in one of those tacks or jibes,” Burnham said. “It doesn’t look like it on TV, but the G-force is amazing.”
In March, Peter Burling, the Team New Zealand helmsman, was tossed off the back of the crew’s new AC Class boat while crossing from cockpit to cockpit during training in New Zealand. He has had no such mishap while racing in Bermuda, but even when sailors manage to stay onboard, there are plenty of reminders of the physics.
While making a cross and racing against Artemis in the final of the Challenger Series, which determined the team that would challenge the defender, Burling was stopped short by the G-forces as he exited the cockpit, his arms moving but his body unable to advance, until he was finally released from the invisible harness and could proceed across the netting.
On Sunday, in the third race of the America’s Cup match, Oracle grinder Sam Newton slipped as he reached the end of his traverse and landed hard on his back before scrambling to reach the relative safety of the cockpit.
It was not pretty, but he made it.
“It was the first thing we watched when we came in to lighten the mood,” Spence said in an interview this week, with his team trailing Team New Zealand by 3-0 in the first-to-seven America’s Cup match. Spence can also now joke about his own, more life-threatening slip in February.
“I went over the front in pretty spectacular fashion, but there’s not a lot of future in that, so I’m not planning on doing that again,” he said.
Spence was crossing in front of the mast on the main beam when the boat abruptly dropped off its foils, struck a wave and sent him skidding forward. If he had fallen off with the boat still fully foiling, the foils would have been closer to the surface, increasing the likelihood he would have struck one as he passed.
Spence surfaced unscathed but shaken, and the incident prompted changes to the cup regatta guidelines. The teams were already using nonskid tape in spots on the hard surfaces of their boats, but all the AC Class yachts were then equipped with a handle at chest height at the bottom of the wing sail mast. Stepping far forward on the hulls was prohibited, with white lines being drawn on the boats about 6 feet forward of the mast to indicate the no-go zone.
“The teams are all looking to optimize the performance of their boats, and that includes weight distribution, and the biggest single moving weight is the crew,” said Iain Murray, the America’s Cup regatta director. “So in light air, they are all trying to shuffle forward and do lots of things, so we just wanted to get it clear. At one stage, we actually said, ‘We want you to look at traversing behind the wing.’ And that turned out to be probably more dangerous than going in front.”
Burnham said Artemis had tried to minimize falls on the cross by having sailors transition before or after a tack or jibe to avoid getting into a vulnerable position. But Outteridge still got caught in midair when his team completed its tack. When he landed, there was trouble.
“When a turn stops, it’s pretty hard to stop your momentum if you’re already moving,” Burnham said. “So we felt it was best not to move in the middle of a maneuver.”
Part of the challenge with the cross is the fatigue factor. Grinders like Spence have often just finished an intense burst of effort on the hand-powered pedestals, producing power for the boat, when they make their move.
But it is also a brief respite.
“There are definitely times in the race when your lungs are gasping for air and your heart is beating out of your chest,” Spence said. “And you see that cross and you say you can stop moving your arms for a few seconds and suck in a few deep breaths and just get over there in an energy-efficient manner rather than end up in the next cockpit just as tired.”
Team New Zealand’s onboard power-producers use stationary bicycles instead of hand pedestals, which can create a different challenge during the cross: shaky legs. Spence said that was one of the multiple reasons Oracle chose not to deploy a similar system in Bermuda.
But Andy Maloney, one of Team New Zealand’s so-called cyclors (a combination of cyclists and sailors), said in an interview Tuesday that the concerns had proved unfounded.
“You see the grinders, they are spiking at sort of 90 percent of their max heart the whole race, whereas we can control it a bit better,” Maloney said, referring to the benefits of leg power. “And I think that helps us get across the boat quicker, because we’re not completely hurting when we are trying to cross.”
The Kiwis practiced the cross extensively and covertly on land on a platform in their base in Auckland before launching their boat — and revealing their cyclors — in February.
“We definitely worked very hard on the footwork in the exact specifications of the boat, and once we got out on the water, we practiced heaps of maneuvers, and it’s become second nature for us,” Maloney said.
An unplanned swim is still not out of the question, however.
“It’s a constant battle,” Murray said.