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Smooth Sailing for Falmouth Academy Grad

To a sailor, the America’s Cup is the Super Bowl and the World Series all wrapped into one passion- and excitement-filled sporting event. Every heat leading up to the final challenge has NBA Game 7 adrenaline pumped into it.

To a boat designer, the America’s Cup is the epitome of style and grace and technology. The competing vessels set the bar for all future boat design.

To Nat Shaver ’04, it’s a dream job – and it’s his for the next year.

By his own description, Nat lucked out when he earned an internship at Morelli & Melvin during his senior year at UC Irvine, where he majored in Aerospace Engineering. Boat designers who had a hand in previous America’s Cup wins and competed as Olympics sailors themselves, the owners of the firm employ only 11 staff so each member gets to be a generalist, according to Nat, and learn about all aspects of boat design.

“Our specialty is multi-hulls,” said Nat. “As a generalist, I am involved from the initial conceptual design and layout to the final details.” The details include overseeing the actual building of his designs in boatyards from California to Florida, although for the last decade, the vast majority of the firm’s projects have been built outside of the United States.

Just two weeks after his college graduation, Nat said he felt his Falmouth Academy training kick into high gear. “I had to make a presentation of the work I had done to BMW Oracle, the best sailors in the world. Going to FA gave me the confidence to feel free to express my ideas.”

FA had also given him a background in math which he hadn’t previously appreciated but is essential for design. “Math was not always my best subject,” he said with a chuckle. “But now that there’s a real application, math is much more interesting!”

In America’s Cup rules, the winner becomes the Defender and can choose the venue and yacht class for the next match. BMW Oracle, the last winner and a customer of Morelli & Melvin, won the right to decide that the next class would be multi-hulled rather than the typical mono-hulled yachts most people associate with this race, and the mainsail would be a hard wing designed for speed with the option of using fabric sails for lighter winds. As a result, however, new rules had to be written to govern the design and the competition.

Morelli & Melvin was asked to evaluate potentials of this new design and to determine new protocol. Nat, now a full-time Morelli & Melvin employee, was one of the chief architects of the new class rule, which detailed the hard wing. Known as AC72, the rule garnered a lot of buzz in the racing community as it outlined a radical departure from what people expected of the America’s Cup. But that was part of the point.

One of the reasons for the new design was to make the race a more recognizable and accessible sporting event easier to televise for prime-time audiences and, therefore, easier to secure sponsors. With the mono-hulls and traditional cloth sails, so much of the time is spent waiting for the appropriate wind and weather that pinning down exact race times (and TV viewing slots) was difficult. Because the multi-hull and hard wing design anticipates performance in a range of conditions, racing times are more predictable.

With better TV exposure, the race can be more accessible to a younger generation of sailors. But the next challenge would be to hold their attention. For that, the boats would have to be sleek and fast and sexy.

“This was an interesting challenge for a designer,” said Nat. “In the end, it’s all engineering and engineering solves problems. We wanted to make the rule simple so that a lot of holes couldn’t be punched in it and, conceptually, we tried to keep the rule lean. It’s what’s known as a Box Rule. As long as the design fits into the box – a catamaran of 22 meters maximum length, 14 meters wide, minimum and maximum weight limits, defined sail areas – anything goes.”

Once the rule was accepted, Nat said the most exciting part of the process could begin: designing the actual boat. Team New Zealand hired Morelli & Melvin as consultants. He has been focusing on creating and running computer simulations for performance of the aero- and hydro-dynamic design for Team New Zealand. He moves to New Zealand in February and will live in Kiwi country for the next year.

“I always wanted to design boats,” said Nat, who grew up sailing and racing on Buzzards Bay.  “I thought I’d have to work for years and years before coming close to designing for the America’s Cup!”

The hull can be any shape. Boats are allowed to have two rudders and two dagger boards. There will be computers in the wind instruments and to monitor the loads on the vessels, but no part of the boat can be controlled by stored power (electricity). The design of the actual boat is open which affords possibilities for creative development.

One benefit of the new design is that it’s easier to create small, test versions, said Nat. “Concepts that work on small multi-hulled boats scale up to larger versions more easily than on mono-hulls.”
Because the hard wing, whose length is almost twice the size of the boat, is a relatively new design concept, trials for the Cup, to be raced in 2013, will start this year using wings that are 45’ so crews can get used to them.

Particular interest in this design piece brought Nat together last summer with Falmouth Academy classmate Oliver Moore ‘04. A boat builder since high school, Oliver was working with his uncle, Steve Clark on this hard wing technology for the C-Class. Steve held the International C-Class Catamaran trophy for 11 years and Oliver’s grandfather, Van Allen Clark, was a pioneer in wing mast technology in the late 60s and early 70s.

In August, Nat watched Oliver and Steve test their wing in Newport in the C-Class tourney, known as the Little America’s Cup. Their boat, Aethon, zoomed across the starting line leaving the other contestants in its wake. But the wind shear from a passing freighter unbalanced Steve and Oliver and they capsized. See the video of Oliver and Steve in the 2010 Little America’s Cup.

The 34th America’s Cup will begin September 7, 2013 in San Francisco.