new breed of large but light yachts to win races to Hawaii and Mexico. It took a few years, but in 1984 Lee’s first Santa Cruz 70 Kathmandu rolled out of the famous barn in Soquel to go up against existing designs that were also rating 70ft IOR but were shorter, narrower and with more sail. With more boats built and some more
refinements, not to mention great sailing by some solid teams, the SC 70 fast became the standard in the new Ultra Light Displace- ment Boat (ULDB) class developing on the US west coast. Since the rating target was changing yearly with annual adjustments to the IOR formula, a clever reverse-age allowance scheme was developed to preserve the competitiveness of the older ULDBs by placing the burden on the new boats to be designed, built, measured and rated at successively lower target ratings. This would help stop a cheque book war of the newest design always being both fastest through the water and fastest on corrected time. Reichel/Pugh first entered this class in
1988, commissioned by a Santa Barbara owner to build something slightly different from the other sleds: instead of long and nar- row, this all-carbon boat was a little beamier to add some form stability while reaching, but also had to be slightly shorter to fit within the class rating limit. Painted bright yellow and named Taxi Dancer, she was also stiffer than previous long, narrow sleds and so in any breeze that was ahead of the beam she was a tough performer. It’s a testa- ment to these boats and this genre that they are all still raced competitively 30 years on. This was the start of what would
become a very lucrative and productive genre for Reichel/Pugh, with designs that exported well from the US west coast: designing outright fast offshore boats that were first-to-finish contenders regardless of rule system. And, with proper mainte- nance, upgrades and sailing talent, would often continue to be so for years to come. Development in the big, fast boats did
not keep Reichel/Pugh from maintaining a hand in custom rating rule projects, espe- cially in some of the most competitive classes. In the super-hot IOR 50s Dr Jim Andrews, with John Kolius as skipper, hired Reichel/Pugh to draw a new Abra- cadabra, and with Jim’s help it was this boat’s success on that highly competitive circuit that led to further commissions from Hasso Plattner for Morning Glory and from the Japanese for Champosa. To achieve these impressive results that
really started vaulting Reichel/Pugh designs ahead in the 1990s, they needed a solid and reliable builder to match their innovation in design with similar craftiness in build. Pugh says he’d wanted to work with Mick Cookson, but got the impression non-Kiwi designers were not welcome at a yard where Farr designs were dominant. So it was a meeting in Hawaii between Pugh and John McConaghy after the 1989 Transpac that would accelerate the trajectory for continued success for the San Diego office. ‘John and I hit it off straightaway,’ says
50 SEAHORSE
Bill Twist was another early San Francisco Reichel/Pugh client, building Blade Runner in 1985. Another successful IOR raceboat – especially in breeze – but again without the rating-driven distortions of other designs of that era which allowed her to both look great and better survive adjustments to the IOR formula without falling off a rating cliff
Pugh. ‘John’s deep-rooted dedication to uncompromising quality and innovation matched our own philosophies, so we were productive from the very beginning.’ An example of this trust came when a few years later the office was asked to extend the competitive life of Alberto Roemmers’ Reichel/Pugh IMS Maxi Alexia, requiring McConaghy to lengthen the boat by a full 9ft with a new bow section. ‘The boat was in Spain so McConaghy’s
team from Sydney needed to travel to Europe to do the [grafting] job,’ said Pugh. ‘We told him, “Now, John, don’t start until we talk this through,” and he said, “Too late, the bow’s already cut…”’ Alexia went on to win the 1998 New-
port-Bermuda Race and that same year’s Maxi Rolex Cup in Sardinia… not bad for a hybrid grafted boat built six years earlier to win first-to-finish honours in the Great Lakes of the US. With McConaghy Reichel/Pugh also got
valuable exposure in Australia with dozens of boats built there over the years, some local and some destined for fame around the world… more on this later. ‘Our designs won three IOR 50ft world titles from 1990 to 1992,’ Pugh admitted mod- estly. ‘They were well-built and well-sailed, and this helped establish good relations with the owners and their managers and led to even more referrals to new clients.’ One of these referrals was to US billion-
aire Bill Koch, who was running a success- ful IOR Maxi programme with his various Matadors. Koch invited Reichel/Pugh to join his America3
programme in the 1992
America’s Cup in San Diego; this at times proved unexpectedly trying, having to work within an existing design team led by MIT professor Jerry Milgram, but ultimately fortuitous. This was not only through adding an
America’s Cup win to their growing list of credits, but also from getting to know
America3 helmsman Buddy Melges. This
friendship led to post-Cup musings about what sort of small boat would be nice as a trailerable, modern, fast one-design that could be built at Melges’s shop in Lake Geneva… Thus the Melges 24 was born and the rest is history, with a strong and valued relationship that would perma- nently tie Reichel/Pugh to a ‘smaller’ but important sector of the market. The fast and innovative Melges 24 then
led of course to the Melges 30, which was reinvented as the Melges 32, and the most recent member of the Melges family, the Melges 14, a very modern lightweight dinghy targeted directly at the Laser. The Cup experience with Koch’s America3 and a growing relationship with
McConaghy now led to Reichel/Pugh being invited into the design programme for the 1995 OneAustralia America’s Cup chal- lenge. With the structural failure that led to the team’s raceboat famously sinking in San Diego, this was not one of Reichel/Pugh’s finest hours, but to be fair they were never in full control of all aspects of the project. Certainly Australian sailors did not seem to blame them, with numer- ous more McConaghy-built Reichel/Pugh designs launched afterwards. Just like the strong relationship with the
DeVos family in the US for their various Windquests and the design of the 1D48 one-designs for their circuit in the mid-late 1990s, a similar bond was made with the Oatley family in Australia on their various Wild Oats projects, starting with the Reichel/Pugh Wild Oats 60 in 2002. This design started as what Pugh calls a ‘fast harbour racer’ before morphing somehow into an innovative offshore racer that helped to usher in a new era of faster offshore designs… The boat continues to collect silverware, now in the Med as the Hungarian-owned Wild Joe. And then came the Swiss army knives.
SHARON GREEN/ULTIMATE SAILING
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