From America’s Cup to Our Catamaran: Rescuing a Carbon Legend
We’d been stuck in Valencia during the COVID lockdown when we came across a piece of sailing history that was about to be destroyed. Rig #12 from Team New Zealand’s 2000 America’s Cup campaign — later used by the French challenger in the 2007 Cup — had been sitting in the old Team New Zealand boatyard in Valencia for fifteen years. The French team hadn’t made the finals. The mast stayed behind. And when the yard changed hands, the new owners were cleaning house.
It was going to be chopped up and put in the bin.
We couldn’t let that happen.
What We Were Looking At
This is a high modulus carbon fibre IACC mast — the kind of engineering that gets built once for a specific campaign and then either gets repurposed by the next team or disappears. Team New Zealand built it, sailed their 2000 campaign on it, and then sold it to the French team who brought it to Valencia for their 2007 challenge. When that campaign ended, the mast stayed in the yard. Fifteen years later it was still there, waiting.
The section is large — not tall by Cup boat standards once you cut it down, but the chord dimension, from leading edge to trailing edge, is significant. This is a serious piece of carbon. The wall thickness, the reinforcing at the hounds, the titanium fittings, the track — all of it built to grand prix specification. None of it belonged in a skip.
The Decision to Take It
Lockdown gave us the time to think it through properly. The mast was 33 metres. Paikea doesn’t need 33 metres. But it was going to be cut down regardless — the question was whether we were the ones doing it or the yard was doing it into a bin.
Shayne had already been thinking about replacing Paikea’s aluminium rig. The original mast was functional but heavy, draggy, and limited in what it could carry. An IACC section — even cut down, even adapted for a cruising catamaran — is a fundamentally different piece of engineering. The stiffness, the weight, the aerodynamic profile. There was no version of this where walking away made sense.
We also couldn’t afford to buy anything close to this new. The opportunity to recycle something this good doesn’t come twice.
What the Mast Came With
One of the things that makes this project unusual is how much of the original hardware was reusable. Shayne went through everything methodically — not just the mast tube itself but everything attached to it.
The gooseneck is original Cup boat hardware. It’s titanium and aluminium, massively overbuilt for a Catana 42, and will never break. Twelve M10 titanium bolts, all potted in place. The titanium padeye at the base came off it too. The 26mm track was already on the mast — Shayne kept it rather than pulling it off and replacing it, though finding the right cars to suit the original Frederiksen track profile turned out to be expensive and time-consuming. The Barlow 24 winch came with the mast — old, rough shape, but solid Australian engineering that Shayne rebuilt rather than replaced.
The nitronic rod sidestays from the original Cup rigging were recycled too — repurposed as dog bones and forestay pin components. The carbon wind wand was another find: a vertical carbon unit with a broken sensor, which Shayne stripped down, extended the wiring, fitted a new BnG sensor to, clear coated, and remounted. It’s the tallest thing on the rig and Shayne’s favourite part of the whole build.
The Mast Base: Ball and Socket
The rotation system sits on a ball and socket arrangement at the mast base. The ball is aluminium — not the standard stainless steel, which Shayne chose deliberately. The bearing area is large enough that wear on the ball should be minimal, and the weight saving over stainless is meaningful. The socket is oil-impregnated nylon inside a carbon cup that Shayne bonded to the mast foot. There’s a grease nipple for maintenance. It doesn’t squeak.
The decision to make the mast rotating rather than fixed came partly from the section size. A chord this large creates significant windage when the sail isn’t up — in 50 knots at anchor, that’s real load on the anchor system and real stress on the rig. Being able to feather the mast into the wind removes that problem. The ball arrangement made rotating straightforward to engineer, and once that option was on the table the reasons to fix it in place got harder to justify.
To make it non-rotating would have required one additional fitting — a tang at the front of the mast ball, with a receiving socket bonded inside the mast foot, to lock rotation. Simple enough. But rotating was better, so that’s what it became.
Cutting It Down
The mast came in at 33 metres. Cutting it to size for Paikea meant making decisions about where to cut and what to keep — and getting those decisions wrong means cutting through the most heavily reinforced sections of the tube, which would mean losing the attachment points for the forestay and sidestays.
Shayne worked from the hounds position. The original Cup boat hounds had substantial internal reinforcing and a tie bar through the section — exactly the kind of structure you want for attaching the forestay and sidestays. He picked up on those existing reinforced areas, using the hounds as the datum from which all the other measurements were made. The masthead position was then determined from there, working down rather than up, to make sure the tip section wasn’t compromised.
A lot of metres came off the bottom. Paikea’s new mast is considerably shorter than what it started as — but the sections that matter are all intact.
What the Mainsail Had to Do With It
The same lockdown period that gave us the mast also gave us a new mainsail. Shayne cut it down from an old delivery main off a Mini Maxi 72 — a proper carbon sail, recut to fit Paikea’s rig. It’s a square-top design with two metres of roach at the head. The mast needs to be stiff enough to carry that without excessive bend in the tip, and the IACC section handles it without concern.
The Code Zero is a different story. First time we flew it fully loaded, the top of the original mast bent far more than Shayne was comfortable with. Not structurally alarming, but enough to make him think about where the masthead sits relative to the load. His view now is that the masthead should come down to the orange band — roughly halfway up the current tip section — to reduce the lever arm at the top when the code zero is fully powered up. That’s a future modification, not something that’s been done yet.
The Result
Paikea has been sailing on this rig since 2021. It’s crossed the Atlantic. It’s carried the family through the Caribbean, the Canaries, back across the Atlantic, and is currently in Valencia while the interior refit progresses.
The full technical story of the rig — the rotation spanner design, the rigging decisions, the winch placement, the jib halyard system — is in the next post. The build diary, with the unlisted footage from the shed in Valencia showing the actual fabrication process, is in the members hub.
The complete mast story is on our free cornerstone page: Paikea’s Carbon Mast: The Full Story
For the build detail, the engineering decisions that didn’t make it into the public videos, and everything else we document for members: Youngbarnacles Members Hub