Iain Murray, Don ‘Admiral’ Buckley and Andrew Buckland. Between 1977 and 1982 Murray’s Color 7 teams won six 18-foot Skiff world titles back to back on a series of Murray-designed boats; a record that went unbroken until 2015 when Seve Jarvin’s Gotta Love It 7 took their seventh title. Their team manager was Iain Murray
Bethwaite as his weather guy, and I used this young fella from Channel 7’s weather room called Roger Badham – ‘Clouds’. We won that race. He was our secret weapon! But going into the last race Dave was
still well ahead. He had to finish third or worse and we had to win to take out the championship. Porter didn’t lose very often – but it was howling and we were a light crew. We were in fourth or fifth place at the last top mark. And none of us had flown a chute all day. Ebb tide in Auckland with a lot of wind
– over 25kt – meant really difficult lumpy conditions for an 18-footer. We were many minutes behind KB when they rounded the top mark for the last time, so Dave sailed very conservatively down the final leg to get himself safely home, putting him far over on the southern shore… We rounded the mark in fourth or fifth
12-footer; now for the 18s I was asking for $20,000! And all that still began the old- fashioned way, mum and I sitting around the kitchen table where we wrote the 70- odd letters that delivered that first $1,000. Then everything took off. I was not long
in the 18s when I got the call from Ted Thomas to say that Channel 7 were look- ing to re-engage in Sydney Harbour and were keen to promote a young local kid – and that kid was me. Dave Porter sailing the all-conquering
KB was ‘the guy’ back then, sponsored by the brewery, and I turned up with this ply- wood boat that I designed and built with John McConaghy, carrying on with a light crew and that flared shape for max right- ing moment – but unfortunately the flare created too much drag on the bigger skiff. Nevertheless, the top six boats in the
fleet got to go to the worlds in Auckland that year, and we qualified fifth. So I went to Channel 7 and said that I hadn’t done a great job with the design, and that we aren’t going to win… But I have a plan!! What I need is a couple of thousand
dollars to modify the boat, and Channel 7 said… ‘OK’. What I didn’t tell them was the mods involved cutting the front 5ft of the bow off, cutting all the topsides off, making it narrower and re-decking it, plus
42 SEAHORSE
making it fuller in the bow! No small deal. I also put a new structural frame in and
re-rigged it – all in seven or eight days and nights just before we transported to NZ. I did it all with Mal Henderson in his
garage. And when we got to Auckland we pulled the cover off it… the first Color 7! And everyone just said, ‘what is that!
That isn’t the boat you qualified in.’ And my response was that 13ft of it is – plenty more than half. Then we went out for a best of five series in Auckland. But we hadn’t even sailed it after all those changes; honestly it had gone into the con- tainer with wet paint and uncured varnish on the deck, all plywood with a bit of glass tissue on top. We didn’t have time to use polyurethane paint – we had to use brittle acrylic as it dried that much quicker. I’d decided there was no point going to
NZ to come fifth or sixth. Although time was tight, big changes had to be made. I was already fearless enough to get the money, to redesign it, organise the mis- sion and get it all done and shipped to Auckland. We were much faster, no question. But
we capsized in the first race, eventually coming fourth. Then one second day we sailed with the smaller #2 rig. Dave Porter went out with his big rig, using Frank
– and we knew our gameplan. Nothing to lose here. No point coming second. So immediately chute up, into north head, gybe and roar into the finish as first home. One of the crew was trapezing off the transom, with two more of us way aft and completely out of position, just trying to keep the bow up! Do or die. On top of that, because the waves were
so big Porter didn’t know where we were! He simply couldn’t believe what just hap- pened! Gybing was of course critical, and somehow we managed to do that. And that was it. We didn’t quite know what had happened either, to be truthful, all we did know was that we had done everything we could to make it happen. And from there we rolled on for another five years. But after Auckland I’d had to change
crew because of some ‘excitement’ during the celebrations which proved too much for Color 7. So I flew back to Sydney to attend a meeting with Sir James Fairfax in the boardroom of The Sydney Morning Herald. I thought I was getting a pat on the back, wrong! If I was to retain my sponsor I was told that I’d need a different crew… But the sponsors were still pleased that I
had delivered the pizza, the goals we set were met, and they supported that. So now I emerged with Andrew Buckland
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