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Matt Wallis

ANACORTES — You can smell the new America’s Cup yacht coming together at BMW Oracle’s Anacortes shop.

But despite the thick odor of carbon-fiber resin, security guards are on strict orders not to say what is inside.

Secrecy is part of the game, and construction manager Tim Smyth can play it.

There is much at stake. The BMW Oracle boat may be the most advanced and fastest America’s Cup vessel ever built. The cost — widely reported as $200 million for the last cup — is expected to soar.

Smyth, a New Zealander with a quick smile and thick accent, will not say where team BMW Oracle is in the construction process, how many boats it plans to build or where it will launch them — though he is willing to give sometimes misleading hints.

“The first boat we built might be in there,” Smyth said, pointing at the mammoth white tent outside the 100-foot by 200-foot, three-story construction shed. But a peek in the tent proves it almost empty.

The team took up residence in Anacortes late last year and began building in December. The yacht for the 33rd America’s Cup is the third BMW Oracle has built here. The team cites Sedro-Woolley’s Janicki Industries and other nearby aerospace experts as reasons for coming back. And this time, the Anacortes waterfront could play an even bigger role — the team may practice here.

Smyth and fellow construction manager Mark Turner are in charge of building a yacht capable of taking back the America’s Cup from the Swiss team Alinghi, which won it in Valencia in 2007.

Smyth and Turner also manage a construction staff of about 50, which is about one-third local. The rest of the staff is from New Zealand, Argentina, Sweden and elsewhere. All must be “known quantities,” said Smyth, meaning they blend into the team and have boat-building, and preferably America’s Cup, experience.

“We selected Anacortes due to our successful track record here, thanks to supportive local officials, a fantastic marine infrastructure and the proximity to aerospace-quality tooling and other support operations required to build such a high-tech America’s Cup boat,” Turner said in a statement last week.

A court battle between BMW Oracle and the Swiss team —under way in the New York Supreme Court — will determine the date and location of the next Cup. But Smyth says he will have the boat ready for racing this October.

“We are on schedule,” said Smyth. “We might build one. We might build two. We might build three. We certainly would have the capability to build more.”

The advantage of multiple boats and an expedited schedule is that his team, BMW Oracle, could launch the boats, practice in them and decide which is fastest. That hull would then be used in the America’s Cup, a best-of-three series.

Competing team Alinghi, on the other hand, probably has not even started to build a boat, Smyth said.

In an office filled with boat hardware and chunks of carbon fiber and honeycomb core, Smyth sits at a desk cluttered with flight schedules and design notes.

“I know we look massively disorganized right now,” he said. “But what we are is massively busy.”

Despite the plethora of paperwork and boat parts, the operation seems anything but disorganized. At first glance, there is a sketch showing a trimaran tacked to a wall, but on a second look, it has vanished. That is because the team has not yet said whether they are building a trimaran or a catamaran or both, though Internet chatter in boating circles is speculating heavily on a tri.

Smyth will not say what the boat looks like. Instead he holds up a piece of carbon fiber and shows off some titanium hardware.

“This cup is governed by no rules,” Smyth said, referencing the court battles surrounding the world’s oldest continuous sporting trophy. Because the defender, Alinghi, could not come to a consensus with challenger BMW Oracle on what type of boats will be sailed, and when and where, the cup has fallen back on its original 1852 format.

Those rules give the New York Supreme Court authority to sort out a place and time, but say very little about what boats to sail.

For BMW Oracle, that meant building the fastest boat possible, a multihull, for just the second time in America’s Cup history.

“I’d say it would be one of the most radical racing hulls ever produced,” Smyth said. “Probably one of the fastest, if not the fastest.”

“The technical limitations, it’s all out the window,” he said, again holding onto the carbon fiber. “The carbon fiber we used (in previous cups) would only be half as expensive as this.”

The carbon fiber is less than 0.4 inches thick and as stiff as rock, though much lighter. He shows off titanium bushing, too. It was made right in the shop and is lighter than it appears.

From price to design to speed, this boat will be more than the America’s Cup has ever seen, but Smyth said its actual components are relatively small and simple.

“Nothing bigger than a 50-pound box of preimpregnated carbon fiber and some honeycomb core comes in the door,” he said, gesturing to a pile of deliveries inside his office. “And out the door goes a massive multihull.”

That is not quite the full picture. Huge molds built by Janicki Industries have already arrived, and at some point, a giant carbon fiber mast and sails will show up.

Smyth hinted that the whole boat will then be assembled, launched and even sailed by the BMW Oracle team right in Anacortes, unlike the last hull, which was flown to Valencia for assembly.

“I cannot say when, where or how we are going to launch,” but “there is a tantalizing possibility that we are going to launch here.”

For now, the BMW Oracle sailors are in France practicing aboard a 60-foot trimaran, and Smyth suggested the word “maybe or possibly” be tacked to the front of all his statements.

* Elliott Wilson can be reached at 360-416-2147 or at ewilson@skagitvalleyherald.com.