one australia yacht sinking

America’s Cup: Sinking of One Australia

Published on March 5th, 2019 by Editor -->

The dramatic moments on the 5th of March 1995, when during round four in the round robin stage of the America’s Cup challenger series, and in a match race between One Australia and Team New Zealand, the Australian boat split and sunk within two minutes off San Diego, CA.

This was an unprecedented event, and while it occurred when the internet was new, significant commentary now exists online. Alongside this YouTube video is a post by King Cliff which seeks to offer closure to the speculation on how such a complete failure could happen:

I built this boat. Yes, the primary winch failed and they transferred the load to I think the running back stay winch. I’m not a sailor, just a boat builder. Either way, it’s like trying to break a stick with your hands close together and then moving them further apart. The boat wasn’t designed to take the load applied at such a distance.

Plus, these boats weren’t designed to be in conditions like this (18-20 knots). They are flat water boats. The race should have been called off. If it was flat it probably wouldn’t have broken even with the winch failure.

A design flaw? In a way yes and no. It only had two bulk heads. Mast bulkhead and a keel bulkhead and both were mealy ring frames and not full bulkheads. But that wasn’t the true problem IMO. The boat was as hollow as a drum. It sure was cutting edge but it had no longitudinal strength. No beams running fore and aft to stop it breaking in half.

I brought this up three times but was told I wasn’t being paid to think. All I wanted to do was put two short longitudinal beams running maybe a few meters fore and aft of the keel box. But no. Weight was the key factor and the order of the day. I think if they were in it may not have broken. It certainly wasn’t too thin a carbon layup.

Why did it go down so fast? The hull and deck finished weighed only 1.1 tonnes. Incredibly light for an 80 foot maxi. The mast was 135 feet long and the single longest carbon structure ever produced. The mast had 40 tonnes of load pulling down on the mast bulkhead. But the cause of it sinking so fast was the foil and bulb attached below had over 17 tonnes of metal combined.

The foil was solid stainless steel weighing 5 tonnes alone attached to a 12 tonne lead bulb below it with small stainless steel wings off of it. So a 1 tonne broken cork being pulled down by 17 tonnes of steel and lead. Down she went!

It certainly wasn’t badly built. It was a masterpiece of construction built to incredibly high standards. NASA standards. In fact NASA took interest in what we were doing as it was built to the same layup as the space shuttle and we were treading new ground and finding breaking points with new technology.

Why did the three fellas stay on the front for so long? Because there was confusion as to if someone was still down below. You can see one guy leaning down shouting through the forward hatch. Inside was full of sails and nothing else. Up to two people are down there at any one time feeding sails up through the hatches or dragging them back down below. Throw in a few hundred tonnes of water and a recipe for disaster for anyone below. Once they were somewhat sure no one was below, they jumped off. They had no choice anyway.

But the key point to make is that the Kiwi boat had the boat speed on us from the start. Even if nothing went wrong they were going to beat us hands down.

Tags: America's Cup , One Australia , tragedy

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DOWN UNDER IN THE WORST DISASTER IN CUP HISTORY, AN AUSTRALIAN BOAT BROKE UP IN HEAVY SEAS AND ALMOST IMMEDIATELY SANK

Author: E.M. Swift

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ORIGINAL LAYOUT

A lot of people were surprised that the boats were on the water Sunday afternoon at the America's Cup trials. It was a rainy, blustery day in San Diego, with winds gusting to 22 knots. The seas off Point Loma were confused, if not especially high, topping out at about five feet. Several of the racing syndicates, wary of risking their multimillion-dollar International America's Cup Class yachts, which are as fast and fragile as thoroughbreds, had radioed the race committee to recommend postponement. Team New Zealand had called. So had France3 and Nippon Challenge. And so had oneAustralia, the syndicate headed by John Bertrand, a native of Melbourne who in 1983 became the only non-American to skipper an America's Cup winner.

Bertrand, whose 75-foot, $3 million boat had been launched only three weeks earlier, checked in, along with two other syndicates, barely a half hour before the scheduled start of the day's racing and told the race committee he thought the seas were unsafe. But race director Pat Healy, noting that the winds were forecast to gust no higher than 18 knots and were then blowing at only 12 to 14 knots, rejected all appeals. Before the regatta, the challenger syndicates had recommended that no race be started if the winds were 20 knots or more, and they were well below that limit as the 1 p.m. race start approached. Healy declared that Day 4 of Round 4 of the challenger selection series would go ahead as scheduled.

The featured race pitted the top two challenger boats, Team New Zealand's Black Magic 2 and oneAustralia 95. The so-called black beast of New Zealand was undefeated on the water, but one of its 24 victories had been reversed under protest. Bertrand's new, light-green oneAustralia 95, having been launched at the start of Round 3, was 7-1 and considered a potential America's Cup winner. Its lone loss was to Black Magic 2 in a match in which the boats were never more than six lengths apart. Both had already clinched a spot in the semifinal round.

On Sunday, Black Magic 2 started well and led by 15 seconds at the first mark. It was 21 seconds ahead when the boats made the second mark and turned back upwind. The breeze had picked up and was blowing some 20 knots. Halfway up that third leg, 45 minutes into the race, Bertrand, steering his boat through the heavy swells, heard a sound ``almost like a cannon going off,'' he would say later. The honeycombed carbon-fiber hull of oneAustralia 95 had hit a wave or a series of waves, and cracked dead in the middle, a few yards behind the mast.

At first no one was sure what had happened. One member of the crew, packing away a sail below deck, assumed that the mast had snapped. ``Then the boat appeared to fold like a sheet of cardboard,'' Bertrand would recall. ``And there was this sickening sound of the boat breaking apart. There was a tearing sound, almost like a zipper. Rod Davis, the helmsman, said, `I think we're going to sink.' He looked to Iain Murray, who was one of the designers of the boat, to confirm. Murray said, `Yes, we're going to sink.' ''

They were all very calm and collected. Bertrand told his crew to get their boots off. None of the sailors would have time to put on a life jacket before abandoning ship. Half the crew went to the bow, half to the stern, as the boat began buckling in the middle. The first men jumped into the roiling sea a minute and 10 seconds after the hull split and swam to one of several nearby support boats. A couple of crew members waited on the bow for another minute or so -- almost too long. Once the hull submerged, the 16-ton lead bulb attached to the keel dragged oneAustralia 95 to the bottom with frightening velocity. Twenty-one seconds after the last man leaped off and swam for his life and less than 2 1/2 minutes from the moment the boat cracked, the top of oneAustralia 95's 110-foot mast disappeared beneath the slate-gray sea. The yacht eventually settled on the bottom, 500 feet below.

No one, fortunately, was injured. Black Magic 2 abandoned the race to help with the rescue effort, and within a few minutes all 17 men who had been on board oneAustralia 95 were safe.

Meanwhile, out on the other race courses, all sorts of debilitating -- if less catastrophic -- breakdowns were occurring. France3 was dismasted nearing the final mark against Rioja de Espana. On the defender's course, Team Dennis Conner's Stars & Stripes broke a batten (one of the carbon-fiber strips that help give the sail its shape). Then it broke a batten car (the titanium joint that connects a batten to the mast). At the starting gun, the bottom part of its mainsail separated from the mast. Finally the Conner team limped along with only its headsail hoisted, a half hour behind America's Mighty Mary, which had cracked a forward ring frame (the lateral structural reinforcements to the hull) and broken its main halyard and would be forced to complete the race under headsail alone.

Bertrand refused to comment when asked if the race committee was wrong in allowing the boats to race in the questionable conditions. But he clearly was upset. France3 supported the committee's decision despite its earlier request for a postponement. ``If the defenders race, the challengers must race,'' said French skipper Marc Pajot.

Harold Cudmore, the French technical adviser, who served in that capacity for America in its successful 1992 Cup campaign, agreed: ``The race committee did the right thing. But the question from an engineering point of view is, Did [oneAustralia] build the boat too light? You take a risk, you have to pay the penalties.''

A more expensive and dramatic penalty could hardly be imagined. The sinking of oneAustralia 95 is considered the worst disaster in America's Cup history. The boat was not a radical design but, rather, a refinement of its predecessors. Seemingly neither more nor less dangerous than most of the other boats in this most delicate of fleets, the hull design of oneAustralia 95 represented, in the end, a search for speed that turned out to be the final, reckless breath of air into a balloon already fully distended. The envelope was pushed, and this time it tore apart.

As of Monday the Australians were coordinating plans with the U.S. Navy to conduct a salvage operation. Bertrand hopes that oneAustralia 95's mast, sails and hardware might be saved and still be of use as his syndicate continues its now highly improbable quest. Bertrand will race his first boat, oneAustralia 94, for the remainder of the trials. In the opening two rounds that boat's record was 8-4.

``[OneAustralia 95] represented about 20,000 man-hours of work, and it was quite sickening to see it disappear so quickly,'' Bertrand said. ``But as I said to the boys, we'll live to fight another day.''

That's one thing to be thankful for. Here's praying it's not a blustery day.

COLOR PHOTO:JACK SMITH/AP In less than three minutes, the yacht cracked amidships and plunged out of sight as Bertrand (opposite, below) and his crew jumped off and swam to rescuers. [OneAustralia 95 and its crew]COLOR PHOTO:DAVID MCNEW/REUTER [see caption above--headshot of John Bertrand]COLOR PHOTO:ACTV/PPL MEDIALINK [see caption above--close-up of crack in hull of OneAustralia 95]COLOR PHOTO:AP/ACTV [see caption above--OneAustralia 95 sinking as rescuers pull its crew out of the water]TWO COLOR PHOTOS:ACTV/REUTER [see caption above--two shots of OneAustralia 95 sinking as rescuers pull its crew out of the water]COLOR PHOTO:AP/ACTV [see caption above--crew of OneAustralia 95 aboard rescue boat]

AMERICA’S CUP
SAILING WEATHER
THE OCEAN RACE
VENDÉE GLOBE

Historical Video : Sinking of the One Australia in America’s Cup 17 years ago

Dramatic moments in the regatta between One Australia and Team New Zealand, of the Challenger America’s Cup series, the Australian boat splits and sinks after two minutes off San Diego, on March 5, 1995.