Rigging an America's Cup Boat with Marlow Ropes

Adam Minter is INEOS TEAM UK’s Senior Rigging Technician. As part of the rigging team his responsibilities include looking after all the rope systems onboard the boat, within the sail and on the rig. As a sailing team with 18 sailors, over 100 personnel and a 6.5 tonne 75-foot boat, if there is one thing INEOS TEAM UK use a lot of, it is rope. To ensure the team has the best and most sustainable possible product for all circumstances, the team have turned to one of the world’s best manufacturers of specialist synthetic ropes, British manufacturer Marlow Ropes.

“We use Marlow for everything”, explained Adam, “every single bit of rope on the boat or around the dockyard is Marlow. Whether that’s the kit line that the sailors use to tie bits and pieces to their lifejackets through to the dock lines for all the chase boats through to the high tensile rope that we use for the top of the standing rigging strops that have got anywhere from 15 to 18 tonnes on them. It’s all Marlow.”  

Before heading to Auckland, INEOS TEAM UK had what Team Principal and Skipper Ben Ainslie described as “one of the best summers ever” sailing in the UK. The team put in significant number hours sailing their first AC75 boat, Britannia I, over a three-month period and frequently recorded six- to eight-hour sailing days. It was an intensive period for the entire team, including Adam and the rigging team, but one that was hugely important in the preparations for the 36^th America’s Cup.

“The UK testing period was really good for us. It was of course a difficult start to the year for us, as it has been for everyone, with the limitations imposed by COVID, but over the summer we learnt a huge deal from sailing our first boat.

“From a rigging standpoint, it being a completely new class of boat, it was important to understand what we can expect from it, and then how we can use that information when transferring to our new boat here in Auckland, and how we can set up similar systems to be more effective and reduce breakdowns.

“Fortunately for us as a rigging team, the Marlow product we have been using has been very reliable, so we’ve been really happy with the summer of testing we had. We have of course also been working on a few little tricks to fine-tune some of our systems but nothing that we can give away yet! For us, it is all about making the rigging systems as reliable, efficient and neat as possible in and around the yacht.”

For Marlow, sustainability is at the heart of everything the British manufacturer seeks to achieve, and that continues through to their work with INEOS TEAM UK.

“Wherever possible we try to use Marlow’s most sustainable products”, said Adam, “for example, for the mooring line on our chase boats we use their brand-new Blue Ocean ® yarn, which is manufactured from recycled plastic bottles. Then, since earlier this year, for all our other Marlow products we have been using their bio-based Dyneema ®  fibre, which again is a greener and more sustainable product as it uses feedstock from waste in the pulp and timber industry as its primary raw-material. 

“From a product workability point of view they are exactly the same products as their non-recycled predecessors so it’s a great thing for us and Marlow to be able to contribute to the vision of enabling a sustainable future for manufacturing in the UK with no negative impact on our rigging performance.”

Now, however, in Auckland, New Zealand and recently out of a mandatory two-week quarantine, Adam is looking forward to getting back out on the water and doing what he does best.

“We used the two-week quarantine as a rigging team to get on top of all the admin work. It’s a bit hard to reel a rope and all your tools into a 30KG luggage allowance! But now we’re all settled in Auckland and back out onto the water it’s back into another training period to put into practice everything we learnt from sailing our first boat over the summer into our brand new boat, BRITANNIA, and get the rigging systems as reliable and efficient as possible before racing begins in December.”