weather to set passage records. There was huge experimentation in rigs and sails, with early split-rig designs preferred for long ocean races eventually evolving unanimously into large sloops. Kilroy’s early Kialoa II and Kialoa III were among the most successful boats of this era, starting with races in southern California and the Pacific, then wandering further afield to the Atlantic, the Solent, the Med, Australia and the Caribbean. Kialoa III started life as a ketch and, based on a string of victories around the world from 1975 to 1977, she won Yacht- ing magazine’s World Ocean Racing Cham- pionship. Yet in Kilroy’s quest to remain on top, the iconic ketch was then converted to a sloop to try to remain competitive in events that were trending more towards inshore than offshore. A new rig, stern, keel and rudder kept the S&S maxi going for a little while longer until the new-generation sloops were introduced in the 1980s. When Kialoa IV was born to race in 1981 the Maxis were in full bloom, racing in venues like Cowes, Porto Cervo, Antigua, Hawaii and San Francisco. The International Class A Yachting Association (ICAYA) was formed to organise the fleet with rules and a schedule, setting off an arms race in design and innovation second only to the America’s Cup.


But, ironically, equipment that worked in the heat of battle on the America’s Cup 12 Metres of the time was not strong enough for the loads of the Maxis, so sail- makers, spar builders and hardware fabri- cators had to work hard to find the line between light weight, strength, perfor- mance, reliability and safety. Just like the America’s Cup syndicates of the day, owners like Kilroy who were leaders in business were also keen to embrace the new technologies to get an edge on the water, as Maxi racing heated up beyond recognition. A lot of the development for the Maxis trickled down through the sport to shape much of the best equipment that appeared over the next 10 years or so. Jim Kilroy was born in Ruby, Alaska on


1 May 1922. His father George was an Irish immigrant who had been attracted to the Yukon to mine gold, but lost all he gained at the gaming tables. Jim’s mother, desperate for a better life for her children, escaped by taking her young family to southern California when Jim was four. These were the depression years and the whole family had to earn dollars and dimes any way they could. During the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Jim, then 10, and his older brother Walter, who was 14, sneaked their way into the Coliseum to sell programmes.


He gained his first taste of sailing – and winning – at the age of 12 in a sailboat contest held for Los Angeles newspaper delivery boys. It was clear from the start that Kilroy’s big pleasure lay in ‘winning’. At the same time as delivering news - papers, Kilroy was working as a grocery store checker and haberdashery clerk, and


which won the 1962 San Diego-Acapulco race in record time. Within two years he’d had Kialoa II designed and built with more records in mind.


By the 1970s Kilroy was surfing the


Jim Kilroy drives Kialoa IV at the Clipper Cup in Hawaii in 1982. During the 1980s a Maxi race programme could take in Florida, the Bahamas, Hawaii, Sardinia, Antigua, San Francisco, Los Angeles, plus the occasional Seahorse Maxi Trophy in the Solent (back when we sometimes opened the wallet). And of course all the great offshore classics, Fastnet, Hobart, Bermuda, even the occasional humble Channel Race. No place for whiners, then


also mopped out a buttermilk plant before going to school each day. He said of those times, ‘What a beautiful thing it was to grow up scrounging. It gave me a lot of smarts, and I still know how to swamp out a buttermilk vat… a stinking job.’ In 1940 Jim got a war-job as a tool clerk at Douglas Aircraft, where he climbed to assistant chief inspector and learned about manufacturing processes, a science that would later stand him in good stead. Demobbed with $156 in his pocket, he came away from the war years knowing what it was like to be poor, and with the conviction that he wanted to be rich. The young Kilroy soon guessed where the money was and got himself hired as a real estate broker. It was quickly apparent that he had found his niche, soon making enough money for himself to convince the banks to lend him a whole lot more. The big jump came through Jim Kilroy


being among the first in his field to realise the potential of commercial real estate located next to airports. His first building programme at Newport Beach was fol- lowed by another on the south side of Los Angeles Airport. He then moved on to do the same around Seattle and San Diego air hubs and laid the foundations for the hugely successful Kilroy Realty Corpora- tion, which now has a portfolio of some 14 million square feet of prime corporate property spread across California. By the mid-1950s he had made enough money to buy his first yacht, a 46ft Island Clipper named Serena. He soon outgrew that and commissioned a new yacht, the first of five to carry the Kialoa name,


front face of a booming real estate market and commissioned what was to become his favourite and most successful yacht, Kialoa III. Designed by Sparkman & Stephens, this 79ft ketch with its cloud of sail became the dominant yacht on the flourishing Maxi circuit. Kilroy recruited a permanent crew to deliver the boat to Sydney, England, Newport and the Mediterranean and flew out to join her with a team of expert helmsmen, tacticians and sailmakers with the single goal of taking line honours in the offshore classics, the Sydney Hobart, Fastnet, Newport Bermuda, Transpac and Middle Sea races. Kilroy pampered his crews, believing that a happy team made an efficient crew. Each wore a red T-shirt emblazoned with the wartime cartoon figure ‘Kilroy was Here’ across their chest. The logo, with Kilroy’s nose and hands looking out over the top of the globe, was also set on the stern of each yacht and became the best known branding within big boat sailing. Kilroy did not like losing, especially if he was wronged, and American broadcast- ing mogul – and America’s Cup winner – Ted Turner was one to find this out the hard way. During a series of warm-up races prior to the 1975 Sydney Hobart, Turner had barged his 12 Metre American Eagle inside Kialoa without any rights. Kilroy, fearing a collision, let him through. But when Turner later appeared in the bar of the Cruising Club of Australia, Kilroy lifted him off the ground by his lapels and said in his face, ‘You ever do that again, you’ll be going home with two 6 Metres’ and walked out.


He was asked once if you have to be rich to race on a maxi yacht. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘You only need one rich man. The rest are poor but good at sailing, and I can tell you they have a lot more fun than the rich man!’


Champion match-racer Harold Cud- more, tactician on Kialoa when Kilroy won two Maxi world championships, says of him: ‘In every generation there is an individual who changes the status quo for the better. Jim was that man at that time. ‘He was one of the great enthusiasts who helped structure maxi racing on a global scale. He was very organised and very competitive, but his enormous self- confidence did occasionally generate a reaction. Kialoa’s Australian navigator had a devilish sense of humour, and when- ever Jim handed over to an alternative helmsman the navigator would alter the boatspeed calibration to show a clear increase. Jim would look at the dial in disbelief, say nothing and after a short period take the wheel back again. ‘The crew would then observe discretely as the navigator dialled it down again.’ Barry Pickthall and Dobbs Davis


SEAHORSE 33


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