A slightly awkward PdS explains the workings of his 12 Metre Victory to Prince Michael of Kent… but a lot more at ease a year later as Princess Michael christens de Savary’s second rather better 12 Metre Victory ’83. Contrasting with his unsubtle launch onto the America’s Cup stage, Peter de Savary had interesting and refined taste in boats. He owned 30-odd boats during his lifetime including the 131ft Herreshoff schooner Vagrant and the beautiful ‘Burton and Taylor’ Kalizma (right). For any cynics who may be reading this, Kalizma was later bought by the equally colourful Vijay Mallya. De Savary also rescued then restored the classic tug St Eval, unlikely survivor of an active Second World War towing torpedoed ships back into her home port of Falmouth often while under enemy fire
By the business end of the three-year campaign it was Smith as skipper and Pattisson his tactician who carried the Victory banner into competition. But that de Savary/Bond connection
also played a key part in the acrimony that raged for most of the summer of 1983 between the defending New York Yacht Club and Bond’s Australia II, by then identified as the most potent of the chal- lengers and carrying the aura of her ‘mystery secret keel’. There was a delicious twist in the story
too, as early on in the Victory campaign it was mooted that Dutch designer Johan Valentijn might join the British after his previous stint with Baron Bich’s French team. In those days you had to be a ‘pass- port national’ to design for your particular team and Valentijn had already been linked with becoming American. Ulti- mately he ended up as designer of the NYYC’s Dennis Conner-skippered red 12 Metre Liberty, which Australia II defeated in the Match itself, bringing to an end 132 years of American dominance. In the preceding summer the NYYC had
left no stone unturned to try to prove Aus- tralia II was not a legitimate challenger. The main line of attack was claiming that it was not Ben Lexcen who’d designed her famous inverted wing keel but that author- ship could be drawn directly instead to Peter van Oossanen of the Netherlands Ship Model Basin and Joop Sloof of the National Aeronautical Laboratory. Another American line of attack was
the legality of wings themselves. And this is where PdS’s programme played its bigger part in the eventual changing hands of the ‘Auld Mug’. Ian Howlett had earlier experimented
with the idea of small fins attached to the keel and already approached the Interna-
40 SEAHORSE
tional Yacht Racing Union (now World Sailing) who granted him approval under a confidential interpretation of the Interna- tional 12 Metre Rule from the Keel Boat Committee. And confidential it would have stayed
until after the 25th Match… but for the fact that Mark Vinbury, the American on the three-man measurement committee in New- port, became embroiled in whether Aus- tralia II’s keel wings were a peculiarity that could be rated equitably. De Savary, in a joint press conference with Bond’s team, revealed with a smile that Howlett had long- standing IYRU approval for winglets… neatly deflating the NYYC’s argument. The Americans didn’t give up in trying
to disbar Australia II but the ground they stood on was getting shaky, while the lengths the NYYC were prepared to go to were by now becoming an embarrassment. The social side of the 1983 America’s
Cup was, by contrast, a hoot. Arguably no team from these shores had made such an impact in the USA since the days of Sir Thomas Lipton. The Burnham-on-Crouch connection went way beyond the Royal Burnham Yacht Club as the very support- ive challenging club, PdS’s own birthplace four miles outside the Essex town and Kit Hobday’s own racing days. Tim and Cathy Herring took their restaurant exper- tise from Julie’s in London’s Notting Hill to open The Ark on Newport’s Thames Street, which quickly became a watering hole to rival established favourites like The Candy Store and Pelham East. Some days you could catch Rodney Pat-
tisson driving about town in his Morgan, painted the self-same dark blue as his medal-winning Flying Dutchmen. Natu- rally there had to be an Ashes-style cricket match with the Australians for which Prince Andrew also turned up.
And afloat PdS brought two other very
eye-catching vessels to town… For his flagship there was Kalizma, the
1906 Clyde-built, GL Watson-designed motor yacht that had once belonged to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Then for daily use, among the privileged flagged spectator fleet, was Lisanola, a ridiculously fast Magnum 55 powerboat. PdS judged you needed such yachts just to fit in, not to stand out. Baron Bich, who made a fortune not
from the ink we actually used in his pens but from what was thrown away, had his Shenandoah as the French flagship, a 180ft Townsend & Downey schooner dating from 1902. And the Aga Khan, head of Italy’s stylish Azzurra syndicate, had brought his gas-turbined Shergar, probably the fastest superyacht of her day. Needless to say, Lisanola and Shergar just had to have a throttles-open race back from the racecourse. There was a good crop of challengers
too in 1983 – Canada, Italy, France and no fewer than three Australian syndicates – and through the course of the trial rounds Victory ’83 emerged as the best of them all… save for Australia II. The British fitted the winglets onto
Victory ’83’s keel for part of the challenger final, but in light airs Australia II was just the nimbler and faster boat, something she proved all over again two weeks later when the Aussies won the America’s Cup at Bond’s fourth attempt and took away the trophy that the NYYC had fought tooth and nail to keep. And which Dennis Conner and crew had sailed out of their skins to try to defend. The verdict on the Victory campaign?
Tony Fairchild of The Daily Telegraph had followed the entire campaign closely. He concluded: ‘The ingredients might have
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