A 92-year-old Jim Davern and a small part of his trophy collection… rather modestly tucked away in his garage, not front and centre inside Davern’s lovely waterfront home as you might typically expect. A weakness for not throwing things away means that Davern can still show visitors his original tin canoe (above) which started it all off in 1940; to put that into some perspective, Davern’s tin canoe went afloat shortly before the start of the Battle of Britain… While his sailing progressed, including a period of dominance in the competitive Stewart 34 class, as did the (literal) house-moving business that funded it all, it was not until 1966 and the Sydney Hobart Race that Davern would make an impression outside New Zealand. Having won the Knud Reimers-influenced 61-footer Fidelis (right) in a boat-swap wager, Davern immediately put his long and spindly new yacht on a diet while also adding a bigger rig. Some of Davern’s local racing rivals doubted a lightened Fidelis would make it to Sydney, let alone get to Hobart. There were indeed repairs needed after a rough Tasman crossing, but none of that stopped Fidelis reaching Hobart a record 80nm ahead of the second boat in
Neil, to join him in ordering new boats to the new Stewart design. ‘They wanted their boats built with heart kauri,’ Davern recalls. ‘Heart
kauri was too dear for me. I could only afford sap kauri, which,’ he smiles, ‘is half the weight of heart kauri.’ His lightweight Princessquickly became the gun boat of the Stewart 34 fleet, which at that stage was not yet a one-design class. The nimble Stewart 34s, which still race aggressively today, became the platform for Kiwi match racing, laying the groundwork for later America’s Cup success. Davern himself was the first Kiwi to compete in the Congressional Cup in Long Beach. As a boy Davern had always admired Lou Tercel’s Ranger, which
ruled the Waitemata for three decades. Tercel built the 60-footer in his backyard to lines heavily influenced by Knud Reimers’ Bacchant. When jeweller Vic Speight built the 61ft Fidelis, designed along similar lines, the waterfront buzzed with anticipation. At last, perhaps, a Ranger- beater had arrived. Initially, however, Fidelis’s results did not live up to expectation.
Never lacking in self-confidence, Davern approached Speight during a post-race party at Kawau Island and boasted that if he owned Fidelis he would beat Ranger. Speight took up the challenge and agreed to let Davern race Fidelisagainst Ranger. Fidelisduly beat Ranger (by just 11 seconds) and, true to his word, Speight agreed to a deal, part of which involved exchanging boats. Under Davern’s ownership Fidelisunderwent extensive modifications,
including a new mast and rudder and aggressive weight reduction. Emboldened by victory in a stormy Auckland to Fiji Race, Davern set off across the Tasman to take on the Sydney-Hobart. Trans-Tasman relations were immediately placed on a war footing, with the Sydney - siders mocking Fidelis as a ‘yellow submarine’ and Davern promising to ‘kick your arse to Hobart’. Which he promptly did. ‘We were 40 miles ahead on the second day,
60 miles ahead on the third and 80 miles ahead at the finish,’ he recalls proudly. When the next boat trailed across the line 17 hours later Davern was on hand to enquire if it had got lost on the way. It was a record margin of victory that stood for a decade and will be for
ever remembered in New Zealand, where every sporting victory over the Trans-Tasman cousins is treasured… and of course frequently revisited. Ivor Wilkins
FRANCE Festival of high performance The launch of the new Imocas has multiplied this summer. After V&B Monbana Mayenne at the end of June, Charal 2 (see previous issue), Malizia ExplorerandInitiatives Cœurall in July, the pace picked up even further. During the last eight days of August we saw the consecutive launch of Holcim-PRB, then Maître Coq V, the new boat of Yannick Bestaven, winner of the last Vendée Globe, and Paul Meilhat’s Biotherm.
It turns out that three of these new boats, all of which have as their
ultimate goal the 2024 Vendée Globe, are also officially entering The Ocean Race, the ex-Volvo Ocean Race, which starts in Alicante in January 2023. They join Charlie Enright’s 11th Hour Team, and the Benjamin Dutreux/Robert Stanjek Guyot Environnement Team Europe (ex-Hugo Boss 2015) tandem already registered in the race’s Imoca class. Note that all these boats, except 11th Hour, are entering the solo
Route du Rhum in November and so have only a few weeks to regroup for full-crew racing and get back to Alicante after the Rhum finish in Guadeloupe… Malizia Explorer, skippered by Boris Herrmann, was designed by
VPLP and built by Multiplast Carboman. Structural reliability was the main priority. ‘The boat is a battleship. It is very strong – very, very strong in every sense of the word,’ says the German skipper, who finished fifth in the last Vendée Globe and was among the potential winners before a collision with a fishing boat in Biscay, shortly before the end of the race. ‘The line between light and heavy is thinner than it once was and
I would say that with this boat we have always tried to be exactly at the median. But in the end many of our systems still came out a little more on the solid and robust side. ‘I had a lot of confidence in my old boat [2015 VPLP/Verdier], but
this one is at another level. I will never worry about the hull – the hull structure will never break anywhere. I am super-confident about it.’ British lawyer Holly Cova who specialises in corporate finance is now
the director of the Malizia team. She said the new boat was built to meet the needs of both round-the-world races with no major modifica- tions. ‘We consider that the two races, one solo and one crewed, complement each other very well… The opportunity to sail with four or five in the South Seas on The Ocean Race, for example, is something new and exciting that will make it possible to test the boat to the extreme before the Vendée Globe,’ says Holly. ‘In my opinion, the other skippers who are not participating in The
Ocean Race are missing a great opportunity for the perfect test bench for the Vendée Globe.’ The other distinctive feature of Team Malizia is the flat management
style – Herrmann is still the skipper, but he is not in the mould of an old-fashioned boss. ‘Ultimately when it is solo racing it is still his boat and his project, but he very much wants to see it as Team Malizia and not just him,’ explained Holly. ‘He will not be onboard for two legs of The Ocean Race, for instance, when Will [Harris, British ex-Figaro sailor] will be the skipper. ‘When you are sailing there always comes a point when one person
has to take a decision and that’s still going to be Boris, but there is input from everyone else and he does not want to be this all-powerful skipper who excludes input from anyone else.’
SEAHORSE 17
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