Opposite: old skiffies don’t fade away but usually they start to add lead beneath the ‘daggerboard’. But old habits die hard… and a couple of seasons back Iain Murray joined his Gotta Love It boys for a few races on Sydney Harbour. The boys were quite impressed. It was back in 2006 that Channel 7 asked Murray to put together a programme to get the brand back on the harbour; over the course of the next 10 years a third place was the team’s worst championship result. Other than that Seve Jarvin’s Gotta Love It crews counted four runner-up slots plus six overall victories. Left: Alan Payne’s 1983 12 Metre Advance featured a ‘pioneering’ mix of non-existent forefoot, with most of the volume aft and a rig set well forward. It was not a success
spinnaker that appeared on Australia III in Fremantle!
What was also interesting was that after
the winter breaks, as a crew we usually came back a quantum leap better. The gelling of the crew after some downtime was incred - ible, more so than during a tense season. Looking back, my 18-footer journey
started when I went in at 16 years old and probably weighing 65kg. When I popped out the other end I weighed 105… I was a growing boy all through that period. We trained hard and signed up to this new place called Nautilus Gym with all these new-fangled machines, and every week I would have to go and buy a bigger shirt! Talking generally about the 18ft era, I
have always been both a bit of a sailor and a bit of a designer. My whole world has evolved around projects. For me the wonderful thing about the
18-footers was that essentially there were no rules. The rules were that you started at 2.30, you had an insignia on your mainsail and the boat was 18ft long. The five years racing and developing the
boats with Andrew and Don were an incredible period of achievement. It was very fertile ground for a creative mind. I loved every minute. To then turn that into a project it was
like bonus time, so that was an attractive place to go as a young kid to expand what I wanted to do. It’s been a great place too for many other young Australians who have pursued yachting to such a high level. The open rule concept is the basis for the very high standard of high-performance sailing that’s emerged out of this country. Things like asymmetric sails and bow
poles all emerged from Bucko with the 18s. We started with narrower, finer, flatter spinnakers with longer retractable poles and with the trapeze-wings giving us that power and speed that created the apparent wind. The sail set-up became really interesting and was something we were fully into. We even took some of those apparent wind lessons into the heavy 12 Metre boats – including an asymmetric
Advance to Newport One personal decision I made soon after those skiff days was that I stopped drinking. Things were now getting a lot more serious. The skiffs stopped and I went to New-
port, Rhode Island with the Cup team Advance in 1983, tinkering around the edges of the America’s Cup in a sort of apprenticeship with Syd Fisher and the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron – so a lot more key lessons learnt. So now I had this incredible opportunity
to build on what I’d observed at Australia II during their work up at home, plus watch people like Dennis Conner and just how well they prepare their programmes. The start for that 1983 Cup experience
for me was that I approached Syd Fischer and said I have been sailing skiffs, I am not sure if you are aware who I am, but I would like to help you with your America’s Cup programme. I went to see him in his office and said I don’t need paying – seven days a week and two years later I was still with the programme. In time I graduated from just steering to
things like helping with selection of the younger guys. To sit alongside such a tough and accomplished businessman as Syd and learn from his acumen and focus, there were yet more life lessons for me right there. Syd Fischer was a very passionate guy. Sure, his reputation is mixed, but I have only good things to say about him. There were a few hard moments but I probably deserved them. Syd was kind of a zero tolerance guy. When I joined the Advance programme
Alan Payne’s design was well underway, construction had started and Peter Cole was running the sail programme. Alan thought he had struck gold with his testing and we had confidence because he had designed Gretel II which was a pretty good boat… albeit 10 years earlier. Our mast built by the Byron brothers was all pretty cool, but underneath it the design was radical. Australia II was at one end of the
spectrum – a short twelve with a lot of sail area and a lot of righting moment. Advance was long and heavy without much righting moment, everything Australia IIwasn’t. And it never worked, which means I still
don’t know how much of a good job we did with what we had. The masts were good and other things we did were good – but never for very long! Once we were eliminated from the Louis
Vuitton Cup – which did not take long – we were adopted by the Australia II campaign to sail Challenge 12 as a trial horse, plus help out with maintenance… and carry the sails around obviously! But the Advance programme did create a
tight group of sailors living and working together on tiny budgets. That core team would later become the Kookaburra cam- paign. Some of those same guys even rolled on into the Wild Oats XI squad 20-30 years later! Including me! In Newport in 1983 the Americans were
obviously very focused on winning at any cost and, as we all know, they weren’t afraid to apply the rules to their benefit – whichever way that was and however it looked. Four years later the Royal Perth Yacht Club didn’t want that reputation, partly in reaction to the obvious bad feeling generated by the US defence of 1983. They had decided to play with an extremely straight bat even to the detriment of the defence… as it ultimately proved. Back in Newport, I used to help Benny
Lexcen out quite a bit around the place. A new boom was needed for Australia II so I was cutting up metal and welding for him, Ken Beashel and me on the tools. Then we are making this boom with Benny, which they raced with. And it didn’t even break! Of course Benny always believed that if it didn’t break it was too strong… Newport was a special place – to go to
events at the Breakers was just extraordi- nary for someone who is still barely 25 years of age. We had this crew house in Newport that was typical student accom- modation but the young dude who owned it lived in the back and drove a Ferrari! About the only thing we did have in
abundance was food and bits and pieces from the sponsorship, plus pallets of Coke… So our morning ritual was to load up our sail truck with all these cans of Coke, then go sell the stuff around town along with great slabs of bacon that we had some- how been left with when Syd left. All of it to get enough money to survive and stay in this amazing town at an amazing time. Things soon changed, however… Back
home and less than a year later the Kook- aburra programme emerged in late 1983. At the age of 25 all of a sudden I am running a full America’s Cup programme as manager, designer and skipper. And so plenty of weight on my still young shoulders, with strong expectations to deliver. It all meant there was no room for getting
sick or any sort of misbehaviour, and in my eyes it was vital to lead by example; as a 25- year-old, employing over 100 people and spending more than 20 million dollars of someone else’s money over four years was a lot of responsibility. It was time to grow up quickly. Just as well I was off the pop! Next month: the Kookaburra adventure q
SEAHORSE 45
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