and Don ‘the Admiral’ Buckley to sail with me – although incredibly at that point nei- ther of them had ever sailed an 18! I already knew Andrew well and he was


involved with the Wilmot family. And as I grew up they were the sailing machine… He was in a sailmaking business called Speed Sails and I invited him to make sails for Color 7, so plenty of in-house experi- ence here and we were soon on it with four rigs and a dozen spinnakers to choose from. Andrew in turn went to school with the Admiral, and he was a big, strong guy and we needed that. So off we went. At the end of that season we went to our


sponsor and said that the most impressive boat in New Zealand was Russell Bowler’s Benson & Hedges – a foam sandwich boat also with a structural frame, the same as his 12ft Skiffs and also Russ’s Jennifer Julian Cherubs. And of course all that developed into the genius of Farr Yacht Design, so we had to go down that path. I didn’t know much about composites


back then so I asked Channel 7 to support my investigations into aerospace materials. They responded with two airfares to America. So I took John McConaghy aside and said, ‘Come on, we need to find out about building composite boats.’ So off we went to NASA and then Ford


Aerospace where we found a guy called Don Sidwell, who helped us as he had just built a carbon fibre car for Ford – a com- plete carbon fibre car in 1977… We met up with suppliers, bought materials, then jumped back on the plane and got back to Sydney and worked out how to do it! The new boat was entirely pre-preg


Kevlar on Nomex honeycomb core. No polystyrene, no Klegecell. No half measures for us! If you ask me about failures – that whole thing was very nearly a failure. We built the boat in a female mould but


we couldn’t get it out. The release agent had melted so we had boat and mould properly stuck together… So we poked and prodded, and for a day or two we steadily cut away bits of the mould. In the end we tucked a bit of 1/16 wire


beneath the mould at the stern, swaged two loops near the bow, and tied the mould to a big post. Then we backed Macca’s car up, looped the wire to his tow ball and drove off… The wire slid down between the boat and the mould, and out she popped. Actually there was a fair bit of damage but it was repairable! That was a fragile boat but it was also


the future. The hull weighed 30kg and it was stiff. That was now the only way to go. Woven/uni-directional Kevlar and carbon pre-preg – the first uni-directional pre-preg boat. In 1978! Of course once painted up no one knew what it was built of. But they knew it was light and stiff. With Andrew designing and building


the sails and Don building the rigs we now had a huge amount of focused horsepower in the boat. That second season we were racing twice a week plus training twice a week,


44 SEAHORSE


and we capsized all over the place. But we were incredibly fast, and so by the time the championships came around we were good enough to tip over a few times and still win races. One interesting side story from that year


concerns a local Kiwi bookmaker. Back when I’d arrived in Auckland with my first Color 7 Carl the bookie rocked up after my first race bagging me out a bit, saying I was just a raw Aussie rookie and he only gave me 100/1 chance of winning. ‘Really, I said – OK, here is $100 to put on us at 100/1.’ So we took $10,000 off him. When I picked that up he said, ‘Ahhhh –


that was a fluke! That last race, pure fluke!’ So I asked him what odds he would give


us to win every championship in the next season, and he said no one does that! That really is 100/1… so I gave him $100 and next season we won everything and col- lected again. So there was additional incentive to deliver at the states and nationals as well as the worlds. When the next championships were in


Sydney, Channel 7 promoted the event in a big way. There were huge crowds on Bradleys Head now supporting us – so from the age of 16 to 22 it was quite a ride. Then in the final two years we (Bucko,


Don and I) went a lot further with the class. We designed and built boats for our competitors and even secured some sponsorships for them. By now we were building at least six 18s a year. Winning six world championships in six


years was incredibly gratifying – and the people around us were good and getting better, so that meant a couple of the later events were pretty close. The second year in Brisbane we had a


sail-off with Dave Porter in the final race – best of six races again. Last race, match racing 18-footers! He was leading and we pulled out a Bucko spinnaker we’d never used before, a ½-ounce sail. We passed him on a light run and after that we got better and better. We were on our way!


Rigs and wings Compared to some we didn’t break that many rigs either – we inverted one down- wind (I still have it at home). But by this stage we were winning by minutes any- way… Truth is that isn’t great for the class. Then we got to the wings! The whole


width/righting moment thing we were very aware of working with flared boats, then John ‘Woody’ Winning plugged in small extension racks, then someone was wearing platform wetsuit boots. Then it went nuts. First Richard Court turned up with this big square frame on two traveller tracks that he tacked from side to side. That one looked pretty agricultural and he was always in trouble capsizing; but a couple of times he didn’t tip over and he was simply away, knots faster. Tacking was slow and manageable, but


gybing was pretty impossible – dangerous too with this guillotine-type structure sliding back and forth! But it was clear that we needed wings,


so we got (12 Metre Gretel 2 designer) Alan Payne involved plus two aircraft engineers, Byron Bros, and talked through the problems involved. We didn’t want wires flapping around interfering with the spinnakers, instead we designed alu- minium extrusions all riveted together – and that soon became the norm. The big racks made for a massive lever


trying to twist the boat as well, so that needed looking at plus they added weight; but the performance gains added so much performance… Now we were into the world of apparent wind sailing, so all the downwind sails had to change too and Bucko was leading the charge. So another huge area of development right there as now the rigs were too soft and so it went on – which is the best part! I was personally really lucky too with


my years in the 18s – I didn’t crash or break any bones, in fact in those last two years we never capsized! We did enough of that in the first year to cover the next five.


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