Yachting: 'Stowaway' takes helm for Conner

By Suzanne McFadden

Ken Read first sneaked on board an America's Cup yacht as a 15-year-old, hiding in the hull with a bottle of beer.

The high school kid who grew up to drive Dennis Conner's Stars & Stripes had no intention of one day sailing a Cup boat.

"My goal was not to clank the beer bottle against the aluminium hull and alert the guards," he laughed. "Not that there were many guards."

Those were the days when secrecy and the Cup were not connected.

In the '70s, Read and his friends from Newport, Rhode Island, could go down at night to the dock where legendary boats like Intrepid were tied up, and jump on board.

Today those boys would be hung, drawn and quartered.

But Read grew up to be a good, honest guy - and an eight-times world sailing champion - who has been entrusted with helming Conner's blue boat in the Louis Vuitton challenger series starting in five days.

Read knows he has been handed a huge responsibility by Mr America's Cup himself, and he seriously wondered if he would be able to sleep at nights in Auckland.

"I just hope we can live up to the Dennis Conner expectations," he said.

Read sailed against Conner in the defender trials in 1995 - Read was on Pact'95 and still sees "the enemy" when he looks at his new Stars & Stripes boat.

But now he harbours a huge respect for a different Conner from the one the sailing world sees.

"When the shore guys are working on the boat at 11pm, Dennis comes out with buckets of chilli he's made for them. On Friday nights, he cooks burgers for everyone and their families," Read said.

"He looks out for the boys, so we want to make sure we get him to the challengers' final."

Read realistically knows that this is a tough task for the one-boat Conner campaign this time.

"I wish we had another boat like this one, and another year-and-a-half to get ready. But we have to face reality - we have one boat and we were very late into the game," he said.

"The reality is that a single-boat programme hasn't won an America's Cup for a long time."

Stars & Stripes has shied away from getting into the practice races on the Hauraki Gulf this past week. It has not been snobbery - Read just does not want to break the boat.

"We have a bunch of people who have poured a tonne of money into this campaign. And if something stupid happens before we start the race, we'd look pretty average," he said.

"All the sailors, like me, want to mix it up with the other boats every minute of the day. But if we broke the boat, we'd be in the base watching the race on the Internet."

So Stars & Stripes have been racing against an imaginary yacht for a month, or lining up with their tender boat.

"We've been kicking our tender's ass," he said. "But we're getting tired of it - we want Monday to come so we can race someone."