News Around the World


Carl Ryves holds the winglets-equipped rudder of the Venom replica he built many years ago as a tribute to his great friend Ben Lexcen. The second 18-footer designed by Lexcen (then Miller), Venom was a floating testament to free thinking, informed by but not constrained by Lexcen’s growing experience in the class. A lot of Venom would be seen in Lexcen’s Cup winner Australia II… most of it good – endlessly paring away at weight did bite John Bertrand’s crew a few times during their ultimately successful challenge


then sank beneath them, to be retrieved the next day after swimming down a string line tied to a bit of wood to mark their location. Then forwards to conversations about the lifelong friendship with


the great Dane Paul Elvstrøm, plus smiling about the time Alan Bond summoned him to join the afterguard on Australia III with Colin Beashel, to win the 1986 12 Metre world champion ships in breezy Fremantle before the 1987 Cup defence, then suddenly asking me if I had seen his new cello (purchased purely because he likes its shape), then interrupting our chat to feed the rainbow lorikeets patiently waiting for him on the veranda. And, as always, the talk comes back to Benny. Ben Lexcen, Carl’s


great friend, adopted by the Ryves family as a teenager, finding stability after never knowing his father, and his mother abandoning him to battle her own demons. And so Benny (who was Bob Miller back then before changing his name) was passed around from aunties and uncles to grandparents. In 1955 Carl Ryves’ father built him an International Star, but


constructed like a cruising boat with a hardwood keel and Oregon planking… and quite heavy. Most of the Australian boats built before the 1956 Olympics were cedar-framed and significantly lighter. Carl’s boat floated about 4in below everyone else’s, but he raced


this heavy boat, beating most of the older guys. He calls them ‘older’, because Carl was about 15 and really had never raced before, perhaps a couple of times as crew on a Vaucluse Junior but remarkably little. Carl’s father was planning to buy him a lighter cedar-framed Star but someone else bought the boat, saying it was available for Carl to race, but then stripped all the gear off it. Ryves Senior was displeased, saying, ‘I don’t want to know you people, I don’t want my son to know you, I am out of the Stars.’ The Flying Dutchman had emerged as the new double-handed


Olympic class and, with the help of a friend at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron who had a set of plans, Ryves Senior now built a new FD for Carl, who was 17 when the boat was launched and just about the skinniest kid you had ever seen, weighing close to 60kg. He may have been light on the scales but he was heavy with


talent, winning the first three Flying Dutchman NSW state champion - ships. Ben Lexcen, now in his teens and working for the railways as an apprentice fitter and turner, travelled to Sydney intrigued about the Stars based at Pittwater and Hunters Hill, plus the new Flying Dutchman fleet, and gravitated to the Ryves household… and stayed. Carl’s parents nourished him both physically and mentally; Mum


fed him and Dad had a library of technical books by Uffa Fox on light- weight planing dinghies and yacht design – including past and current America’s Cup lines, plus Manfred Curry’s book on design theory with its chapters on aircraft wings, sail configurations and the resis- tance of air and water. Curry’s iconic book even included an extra- ordinary photograph of an iceberg in the middle of a river, beautifully


22 SEAHORSE


shaped by the waterflow around it into a perfect foil shape. Carl credits these books and images in helping Ben with the


theory of sailing in the early days, when he slept in the lounge or out on the veranda and washed his jeans while wearing them in the shower, where he also played the harmonica… because he liked the acoustics of the shower cubicle. Listening to Carl talk of those halcyon days, it seems as if they


were eternal summers with an almost Huckleberry Finn simplicity. Discovering a new Flying Dutchman at the nearby Sydney Yacht Squadron, finding plans and then going home to build one of his own – the boat and rig in the garage and then making the sails with his mother’s sewing machine. They made everything, they built all their boats and rigs and made


the fittings, the gooseneck and rudder fittings – everything. Benny’s job at the railways allowed him to fabricate the hardware. The first set of sails he built was for Carl’s FD, on the floor of their house. To transport the FD they would strap it to the roof of the family’s


Holden car, driving up to Lake Macquarie, sometimes sailing all night when the breeze held in, just for the love of sailing. Carl and crew Dick Sargeant later competed at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico with their entirely homemade FD, coming fourth behind the dominant gold medallist Rodney Pattisson in, it seems, another age. Carl still has an enormous library of sailing and flying books,


many of which were owned by his father. I have one in front of me now, the 1953 edition of Dr Manfred Curry’s technical book, Yacht Racing – The Aerodynamics of Sails, first published in Germany in 1925 then in English in 1928. And this is the actual copy that fascinated the young Ben Lexcen so much. The brilliance of the book is Curry’s ability to describe complex


issues in a simple way – and Benny wasn’t stupid, but as he left school at around 15 years old some of the more technical sailing formulae may have intimidated him. Not so the images of bird feathers and biplanes, helping to


describe airflow and eddies around foil edges and wingtips, plus photos of ice boats with profiled and rotating masts, scows racing on Lake Geneva, bendy booms, Stars and the J-Class Enterprise sailing with a Park Avenue boom – meaning there was plenty of detail to fascinate the inquisitive Ben. Alan Bond was to say later, ‘One of the marvellous things about Benny is because he hasn’t been blinkered by a tertiary education he hasn’t learnt that certain things are impossible, so his mind has been free to roam around the most outrageous design concepts.’ And did his mind roam. A testament to this is still under a tarpaulin in Carl Ryves’ garage,


a replica of the 1961 world championship-winning 18ft skiff Venom, which Benny designed and which revolutionised the skiff class. His first attempt was the Taipan in 1959, made for him by boat- builder Norm Wright when Benny was in hospital for three months,


BLUE ROBINSON


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