soon graduate from law school, after which he would become either a lawyer or a sail- maker. He was soon recruited as a North rep for Germany, travelling to San Diego for a year learning the trade as an appren- tice, after which he returned to Germany with a Star boat loaded with sailcloth and sails to start North’s first non-US opera- tion. This loft supplied half of all the sails at the 1972 Olympic Regatta in Kiel, and for some years was actually the largest operation in the North system.
And while most Tigers were not trained businessmen, Wagner was smart enough to secure an exclusive right to the North Sails trademark in Europe, with lofts soon opened in Belgium, Italy, England and Scan- dinavia. It was during the 1980s explosion of interest in windsurfing that Wagner also added a production facility in Sri Lanka, to produce the rigs and sails for this massive market, including those used in the 1984 and 1988 Olympics. As president of the North Sails Group in 1985, Wagner became one of the first people to promote the benefits of offshore production. Wagner’s success was also an indication of how Lowell operated the company in those days: create a strong product, embrace those who had abilities and an entrepreneurial spirit to want to help produce this product, give them some training and a share in the company and then turn them loose.
Another early Tiger was Tom Blackaller, one of the most flamboyant personalities in sailing in the 1970s and ’80s, who in San Francisco started the North loft in Alameda. Blackaller had already made an impression on Lowell as an accomplished Star sailor, and he then went on to great success in other keelboats, in offshore sail- ing and the America’s Cup. He also inspired up-and-coming young talent from the area, including urging a young Paul Cayard to join North, who like many others spent his time in San Diego learning the trade. It was Lowell’s foray into the America’s Cup in 1977 that led to acquiring additional Tiger talent, such as Jim Allsopp, a recent Star World Champion, but it also had its mixed blessings: despite being a platform for the development that Lowell so enjoyed, it was also an environ- ment of many other pressures not suited to his easy-going, professorial personality when up against the likes of someone like Ted Turner, the Mouth of the South. North’s development of the first use of Mylar in headsails – initially made of a dark green colour that had onlookers referring to them as ‘garbage bags’ – had Turner worried, and he was soon putting fierce pressure on Lowell to sell him one. ‘Lowell never said anything bad about anyone, and was always honest with every- one,’ recalls Allsopp. ‘This helped make people remain loyal to him.’ When Lowell was relieved of his position of skipper on Enterprise, the young 21-year-old bowman Rod Davis was among several who were visibly distraught at the announcement.
28 SEAHORSE
Definitely not Hawaii… Lowell North steers his Nelson-Marek 42 Sleeper downwind in the Solent during the rough 1985 Admiral’s Cup in Cowes. The series would conclude with the roughest Fastnet Race on record – with the exception of 1979 – from which Sleeper would retire… along with 23 other Admiral’s Cup competitors out of 54 entries
Technology Tigers
One of the most successful career salesmen at North, the ever-affable Tom McLaugh- lin (or ‘Tomac’), was sailing at San Diego State University in the early 1970s and working at the San Diego loft part time. He was then hired as a full-time salesman, based first in San Diego then in Milton, Connecticut. McLaughlin said that a key to North’s early success was in Lowell’s relentless quest for perfection in every aspect of sailmaking. This would become especially important as his loft network grew with multiple producers creating products under his brand.
‘Not only were fast shapes important, but so too was the ability to reproduce these shapes consistently and have them hold their shape over a reasonable cycle of use,’ he says. ‘There were endless hours spent testing to determine fast shapes, so Lowell realised he needed to focus on methods to reproduce those shapes, and the importance of cloth quality and consistency.’ McLaughlin reckons that one important step forward for consistency came when Lowell hired Pete Bennett from Chicago to come to San Diego to run his production
operation there. One of Bennett’s early innovations was to create templates made of Mylar to use in cutting panels to reproduce the shapes that Lowell and his designers would determine were fast. As for cloth quality, McLaughlin says Lowell was relentless in his pursuit of test- ing standards, leaning heavily on the cloth manufacturers back east – accustomed to supplying less demanding customers. ‘The biggest name in sails in that period was Hood, and they had developed a proprietary method of producing strong low-stretch cloth that was also soft,’ says McLaughlin. ‘They would not sell this cloth to anyone else, so we had to work with Bainbridge, Sol Lamport and other sailcloth manufacturers to develop cloth types that met our specifications. At the time Lowell was the only sailmaker doing testing and research to help create new standards for these cloths.’
But to get to those fast shapes efficiently and consistently there needed to be something more than the empirical methods being used by sailmakers of the day, including North. Enter the first Technology Tiger, Heiner Meldner, who
GUY GURNEY
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