July 25, 2007
The Clipper Ship of Today: An Interview with David Kaplan Posted by Allen Barra at 10:50 AM EST David A. Kaplan’s new book, Mine’s Bigger: Tom Perkins and the Making of the Greatest Sailing Machine Ever Built, is an exhilarating account of how Tom Perkins, the man most responsible for bankrolling Silicon Valley, created “the perfect yacht”—the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, and most self indulgent sailboat ever: the Maltese Falcon. A modern-day version of the classic clipper ship, the Falcon is as long as a football field, more than 40 feet wide, and cost a cool $130 million to build. Kaplan, a senior editor at Newsweek, talked to us about Perkins and his amazing creation from his home in New York. First, I’ve got to tell you, I never thought a book on a sailboat could keep me so enthralled. You call Perkins’ amazing ship, the Maltese Falcon, a descendant of clipper ships. Could you give us the short form on the evolution of sailboats from clipper ship to super ship? The clipper ships, which fascinated the Americans and Brits and much of the world with their tales of speed and adventure, had their heyday for only a few decades, from the 1850s into the 1870s. They weren’t unconventionally rigged; they were multi-masted square-riggers, which had been around for centuries, but they were long and narrow and built for speed. And because they carried only light cargo, like tea, they could make the most of their large sail area. The clippers were called that because they either “clipped” off speed records or sailed “at a clip.” After the clippers faded from the scene, replaced by steam-powered vessels, sailing became recreational. The J-boats were beautiful and colossal sloops; catamarans could skim along the water and achieve great speed; the America’s Cup boats over the years experimented with new designs and materials. But the revolutionary rig of the Maltese Falcon represents the biggest advance in sailing in 150 years. Tom Perkins calls it a “clipper” because of its 15 square sails and because he aims to evoke the romance of yesteryear. But he also calls it a “yacht,” as the boat is over-the-top in luxury and high-tech materials and finish. Why revolutionary? Unlike the clippers of yore, the Falcon’s rig is automated and computerized, and there is no rigging whatsoever. The 35-ton carbon-fiber masts are freestanding—no stays or shrouds to support them—and to adjust course, the masts themselves rotate. On the old clippers, two or three-dozen deckhands had to maneuver the yardarms by pulling on ropes (sheets), in a complicated, time-consuming, and dangerous maneuver. On the Falcon, you press a button. It’s rather unbelievable. One of the interesting questions you raise is why any sane man would spend $130 million of his own money to build such a boat. Why don’t you take a crack at answering that for us? Well, it’s a lot easier if you have $500 million or so to begin with. And one certainly can rationalize that it’s a reasonable investment, given that Perkins says he’s had offers to sell the yacht for more than he paid for it. But the bigger answer is that he has spent his life on creating things—that’s part of what venture capitalists do—and this is his ultimate creation, as absurd or profligate as it might seem to some. Who are Perkins’s biggest rivals? Who’s come the closest to creating the equal to the Maltese Falcon? How close does it come to matching its performance? The Falcon has no rivals, given its unique design and that no other mono-hulled cruising boat comes close to it in speed. There are racing boats, ultra-light and stripped down, that will go faster in certain conditions, but it’s like comparing apples and elephants. And more important, from Perkins’s perspective, they’re so different as to not constitute rivals. None of that suggests that Perkins doesn’t watch what others are doing. As I discuss at much length in the book, the two other mega-yacht sailboats, both owned by Americans, were always on Perkins’s mind during the conception and construction of the Falcon. And he was on their minds, as the Falcon was built. Jim Clark, of Netscape fame, built the magnificent but plodding schooner Athena; Joe Vittoria, who made his fortune in the Avis buyout of the 1980s, built the largest sloop ever, Mirabella V. Both of those boats have their fine attributes—Athena is classic and Mirabella V can rocket upwind—but neither can match the Falcon in sustained speed. And of course, Perkins’s is bigger. The show down between the Maltese Falcon and the Mirabella V was something of a modern classic. There are those who maintain that the Mirabella V might have won or at least made a better show had she not sustained a two-foot tear in her mainsail. Can you describe their race and what it proved about the essential difference between the two ships? I think it was widely anticipated, but not quite a showdown. Not a real racecourse; more in the nature of two drag racers who saw an opening on the Interstate for a few miles. Unless you have a real racecourse, with different angles of sail and over a few hours of time, then you don’t have a real test. The breeze approached 20 knots, and both boats were really surging along. Mirabella V seemed to do better than the Falcon beating to windward. And that was to be expected, given that she’s a sloop, and no square-rigger’s going to excel upwind. When both boats bore off to the wind, the Falcon did better, also to be expected. But, alas, you didn’t have a real racecourse, with different angles of sail (which is why courses are typically triangular) over a few hours, so it wasn’t a true test. And of course, the breakdown of Mirabella V abbreviated what competition there was.
But it sure was exciting while it lasted. Two mammoth sailing machines in a stiff breeze and building seas off the coast of Monaco on a summer afternoon. Hard to imagine better nautical times! When one of the boats passed the other’s bow—heeling over, white foam rushing out from the sides—it was spectacular. One of the most interesting things about Mine’s Bigger is the information on the history and evolution of the clipper ships. I hadn’t realized that the era of the clippers was so short-lived. You write about the 1872 race by the British clippers Thermopylae and Cutty Sark from Shanghai to London, both fully loaded with more than a million pounds of tea. The Cutty Sark lost but earned the reputation as the superior ship, which it maintains to this day. Why is that? The era of the clippers was indeed short-lived. And given the rapid emergence of the steam engine and steamships, it might have been even shorter, except that the clipper ships still had value on some long runs that involved carrying light cargo.
The Cutty Sark won other loosely defined competitions. Remember, there weren’t races as such, but coincidental departures (no owner was going to keep his vessel around waiting for competitors who were likely carrying the same commercial cargo, like tea). But more than its reputation as a faster ship, I think it won over the hearts of the British, because though it lost to Thermopylae in that epic 1872 contest, its noble recovery from near catastrophe in the southern waters of the Indian Ocean seemed more worthy. And as it was, the Cutty Sark didn’t arrive in London that much later than Thermopylae.
The tragedy of the Cutty Sark is it was heavily damaged in dry dock in London a few months ago, after 50 years as a leading tourist attraction. It remains to be seen how much of the great ship will be restored. What’s the life expectancy for a great sailing machine like the Maltese Falcon? That is, given the inevitable advances in sailing technology, advances that the fame of the Falcon herself has helped push, how long is it likely to be before a bigger and better ship comes along? And in what area are the advances most likely to occur? “Bigger” could come any time some tycoon decides it needs to be. Sailboats don’t scale vertically, because most owners want to be able to fit under the major bridges of the world (Golden Gate, Verrazano, Bridge of the Americas), so the masts can’t be much taller than than the Falcon’s. If you get much longer, then you need to add additional masts. In theory, it wouldn’t be hard—just more expensive. I have heard that a well-known Mideast figure has considered a sailboat well over 400 feet, but it’s still just chatter, and in any event, that boat would most likely still be a traditional ketch or schooner. The interesting thing to me is that no other boat with this revolutionary rig, the DynaRig, or what some are calling the Falcon Rig, has yet been announced. I suspect the reasons are both economic and aesthetic. Cost worries even gazillionaires, and most yachties want a traditional-looking boat. Call Tom Perkins’s boat whatever you like—a magnificent, ultra-modern machine or a strange vessel only Darth Vader could love—but it ain’t traditional-looking. “Better”? Nobody I talk to theorizes a better mast material than carbon fiber, so I doubt you’ll see advances there any time soon. Hull material? Somebody will someday build this hull not out of steel but out of composite materials (like carbon fiber and other materials), but that will only marginally reduce weight and increase speed. Computers and fiber optics? It’s hard to see so far how the Falcon can be improved, though perhaps speed of mast rotation and sail deployment might get a little better. But sailing advances are very slow in the making, and that’s one of the reasons this boat, and its owner, so fascinated me. This “clipper yacht” represents a leap in the way megayachts are sailed—in some respects the kind of leap represented by the clipper ships of yore.
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