Light Wind Plays the Heavy for Race Leader Conner : Sailing: Stars & Stripes was a half-mile from the finish when time expired.

SAN DIEGO —  Tuesday was a lazy, hazy day, the kind that will kill sailboat racing as a spectator sport.

The attendant fleet pitched and rolled in a deep swell somewhere off Point Loma, inducing an epidemic of mal de mer and spoiling everybody’s lunch.

The nine boats competing in the International America’s Cup World Championship drifted agonizingly slowly around the three-lap, 21.2-mile course.

The wind peaked at about 8 knots and dropped as low as 2 1/2, when Dennis Conner seized the moment to give a clinic in light-air sailing. He coaxed Stars & Stripes past Paul Cayard’s Il Moro di Venezia (ITA-15) like a ghost and went on to a build a 10-minute lead.

But Conner didn’t win. Nobody did. He was still a half-mile from the finish line when the 4-hour, 45-minute time limit elapsed.

Was he disappointed?

“No,” he said, “I was pleased. The boat did just fine, the crew did well. It’s hard to be disappointed when you’re three-quarters of a mile ahead.”

At the time, his lead over most of the boats was comparable to what he did to New Zealand with the catamaran in that angry America’s Cup defense 2 1/2 years ago.

Conner had said his goal wasn’t to win the worlds but to use them as a reference point in his program pointed at 1992. Although he lacks his rivals’ full inventory of sails, his boat, launched only a month ago, compares well to others that have been tested and tuned for a year.

“We (have been) pretty fast upwind in a breeze, we weren’t slow in medium air and we were OK in light air (Tuesday),” he said. “It’s pretty hard to ask more out of a boat.”

Far back in the fleet, cheers must have gone up on some other boats, because the race didn’t count and won’t be re-sailed. New Zealand, running fifth at the end after jumping the gun and having to re-start, remains atop the standings. Next come the two Il Moros, which were second and seventh.

Going into today’s fifth and final fleet race, the two American defense teams will be fighting for the fourth and last berth in the sailoffs Friday and Saturday--Conner’s Stars & Stripes, with 14 points, and Bill Koch’s Jayhawk, with 16 3/4. For Conner to protect the fourth spot in the sailoffs, he must finish no more than two places behind Koch today.

It’s been a tough series for Chris Dickson’s Nippon Challenge, which was picked by some observers win this event but now has virtually no chance of reaching the sailoffs. The mast fell down in the first race, he was running dead last when the race was called Tuesday, and his father Roy has been laid off as the syndicate’s operations manager as a cost-cutting step.

Conner said Stars & Stripes and Cayard’s Il Moro have been proven to be good all-round boats.

“Paul sailed a good race,” Conner said. “His boat’s going well.”

They went in opposite directions at the start--Conner to the right side of the course, Cayard to the left, with Cayard coming out 1 minute 18.6 seconds ahead at the first mark before the wind started to fade.

Meanwhile, New Zealand sent its idle third boat--the one built by Cookson that is supposedly faster than the Martens the Kiwis and Spain are sailing in the event--out to the windward mark to radio back wind conditions to their competing boat.

The information might have been more valuable if Rod Davis, who was steering the boat for the second consecutive day, hadn’t started prematurely.

Stars & Stripes blew out its fifth spinnaker of the series on the first off-wind leg but raised a smaller sail in its place and--surprise--pulled away from pursuing boats. Jayhawk, in third place, fouled its spinnaker, slowed down and blocked the boats behind it, allowing Conner to get away.

When Cayard had trouble inching his red boat around the second windward mark in 3 1/2 knots of wind, Conner held his speed and slipped around smoothly.

Then, with his crew holding the boom out to keep the mainsail stable in the wave motion, Conner put his stern to the swell and rode it past Il Moro as that crew struggled to get a sagging gennaker to draw air.

Conner was not enthusiastic about sailing his new boat in the worlds, but, for ego’s and his sponsors’ sake, he has made his point.

“I don’t think they’ll be talking about how far behind we are in our program for a while,” he said.