Opposite: not the day it all began but the day 17-year-old Iain Murray’s first 18-foot campaign hit the headlines, after which the rest is history. The very light crew of Murray, Ian Souter and Shane Corbett is seen on the last run in the 1977 worlds in Auckland, the only boat to fly a kite in the gusty 30kt breeze and surviving downwind – with a gybe – long enough to overtake ‘outgoing’ top-dog Dave Porter and take Color 7’s first world title. Murray’s 18-footer had been pulled apart, redesigned and almost entirely rebuilt in the week before leaving for New Zealand. Left: a few years earlier and Murray with crew Shane Corbett relax after wrapping up the Inter-Dominion 12ft skiff title on the Murray-designed Sunset Motels. Below: Murray’s father Alan works on Color 7 as Mum watches on patiently…
heard I was going they didn’t want it to happen, so they gave me a 16ft Skiff for the following season. That gave me a year in that class – which was a big deal as there were hundreds of them. So another big step up for me. And that club boat even came with crew – all older guys. But honestly I found that adjustment to crew and it not being my boat hard, not to mention competing with secondhand sails. For the big regattas back then you had
to qualify from your zone, and ours included Middle Harbour, Manly and Drummoyne. We did that, then headed up to the nationals in Bowen in Queensland where we got a 10th, so that wasn’t too bad. Nevertheless, I went straight home and built another 12ft Skiff… then came third in our first Nationals! So now I started to think about it all a
and that I would sell what I had and use that as my budget. Dad had a factory in Manly, and that is
where I built the new Cherub… then winning the nationals aged 13. I was young, sure, but I was already planning as well as I could, drawing out everything as accurately as possible. First thing I’d done was drag my mother down to the art shop and buy all the right drawing instruments! The design was fairly extreme. It wasn’t
wonderful in light winds, but we learned to live with that because downwind when it blew it really was ‘see you later…’ In terms of influence at such a young
age, I’m really not sure where I got the ideas from, but Ben Lexcen was certainly a mentor to me. With my Flying Ant I used to get my mother to put it on the roof rack and we would drive down to Miller & Whitworth and rig it up outside the shop, pull on the main and drag Ben out to ask him 100 questions. He must have seen that energy and enthusiasm in a young sailor because he always gave me the time of day. I won the Cherub Nationals in that boat
in Botany Bay. Grant Simmer came second. Most of the top guys in the fleet were in their 20s, but I was never really intimi- dated by any of them as I was quite a big
kid for my age. I wasn’t ever hanging out in an Optimist for season after season, for me it was about: goal, conquer, move on. Goal, conquer, move on… And I am not sure where that all came from – it’s not really a family thing as far as I can tell. But there were some pretty impressive people in the family tree, with my Scottish her- itage including a distant relative in the 1800s who captained a ship sailing between England and Australia. For my first design I’d gone with a very
straight boat fore and aft, then flared at the transom and carrying max beam all the way back. It didn’t have much spring (rocker) and the ends were always in the water – like a modern racing yacht. But it planed faster than the other boats and we were a light crew, so when we were reach- ing we were super-fast… Great times, memorable and pretty formative. Harder work in the light, though! Immediately after winning that nationals
I started building a 12ft skiff called Jet-Set. It wasn’t a great boat, however, very low freeboard and quite tricky to sail; an over-canvassed 12 was also a big step up for a 14-year-old… but we learned a lot! Around then I was planning to leave the Middle Harbour Skiff Club. When they
bit more. My next 12-footer was a depar- ture from before with significant differ- ences, in particular higher freeboards and multiple rigs. By now I am 15-16 years old and we went really well with that boat including winning the 1974-75 Inter - dominions. In Dad’s factory he had an old solid timber staircase which became a sort of jig for all the boats from the Cherub onwards. The two big solid rails were what I would stand the frames on… My father was both hands-on and incredibly supportive with his ambitious 15-year-old.
Into 18s – delivering the pizza From the Cherub I had used Hugh Treharne’s sails and he was ‘the’ 18-footer guy. I spent a lot of time with him after school up in the sail loft – trying to learn – and so in the Cherub and 16-footers we used Hughie’s Blue Peter sails. But I still carried on at school and did well enough in maths and science to get into Sydney University to study mechanical engineering and naval architecture. It was going into my last year at school
that the 18-footers first started to feature. Later in 1975 we secured the first big sponsor ship from Channel 7, but at first my goal was to keep Sunset Motels onboard as they had been loyally backing me from 12-footer days. But to move into the 18s a much bigger budget was needed. Back then I was asking for $1,000 in the
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