been right, the mix was not.’ Given Alan Bond’s success after four
campaigns in succession, it was a surprise that de Savary sat out the Fremantle Amer- ica’s Cup of 1987. Graham Walker main- tained British continuity with the enthusi- astic but ultimately rather so-so Crusader campaign. De Savary then returned with a bang in 1988 with what became the Blue Arrow Challenge. Remarkably he’d secured backing from Tony Berry, boss of the Blue Arrow employment agency, in a deal linked to a proposed housing develop- ment on Canvey Island on the Thames out to the east of London… Property was a recurring theme in PdS’
multi-faceted business life and Blue Arrow was based initially in Ocean Village, where design boss Derek Clark recruited Geoff Willis from the atomic weapons establish- ment at Aldermaston as an early move to fully embrace CFD. Willis went on to have a long career in Formula 1 (Leyton House, Williams, BAR, Red Bull) and is now back in the Cup with Ben Ainslie’s Team Ineos. In 1988 the de Savary team relocated to
Falmouth where PdS was also getting Pendennis Shipyard off the ground, as well as a marina village development next door. Pendennis’s first superyacht new build was the 125ft Taramber, designed by Dubois and named after PdS’s daughters. The 1988 campaign was even more
prolific than Victory’s, starting with two brand new 6 Metres for testing. At this time PdS, who always had a keen eye for a yacht, also acquired the superb Her- reshoff-designed 131ft schooner Vagrant, originally built as a 21st birthday gift for Mike S Vanderbilt. Vagrant was brought to Cowes Week
where PdS held court, entertaining the likes of Terry Wogan and Nigel Dempster onboard. Chris Law variously thrilled and terrified everyone onboard with fly-bys in a 12 Metre with inches to spare. When in 1987 Dennis Conner won
back the Cup he’d lost he did so on his terms. No longer at the NYYC’s beck and call, his San Diego-based team had already trained in Hawaii before heading to Fre- mantle. Always an adopter of smart ideas, Conner saw what Alan Bond had done in switching the naming of his yachts from Southern Cross to Australia and Australia
II, and adopting the boxing kangaroo to give his private enterprise the trappings of a nationally representative team. De Savary had done something similar
using ‘victory’ and a cartoon bulldog called Winston as his mascot. So Conner employed Stars & Stripes and SailAmerica as his ciphers. He realised there was value in hosting the America’s Cup too, and spent much of the remainder of 1987 seek- ing venues prepared to pay for the right. San Diego was not the nailed-on host city that the Cup community had presumed. It was into this hiatus of an as yet
confirmed venue that a frustrated Michael Fay launched his Big Boat challenge from New Zealand with the Farr-designed KZ-1 90ft LWL monohull for a Match under the terms of the Deed of Gift. Just as happened when Ernesto Bertarelli
and Larry Ellison went head to head in the same courts 20 years later, in 1987-1988 the drawn-out legal fight with Conner’s SailAmerica and the San Diego YC in the New York Supreme Court snuffed out the impetus of the marvellous Fremantle event. Other teams felt disenfranchised when
the field shrank to just Conner v Fay yet de Savary was determined to do something about it. Not only did he demand a chance to race but he built a boat to do so. Using the freedoms of the Deed of Gift,
his big team of designers created a 65ft-long slender hull and cruciform cross beam. It carried a wing sail and, up to speed, sat on T-foils at either end of the beam. A tremen- dous example of forward-looking thinking, it was no surprise that FD Olympic medallist Jo Richards, also part of the design team, was the helmsman. It would be another 25 years before foils became mainstream in the America’s Cup. The Blue Arrow foiler never got the
chance to race. Without mutual consent the Deed of Gift contemplated a match solely between the defender and a single challenger. The foiler became another one of the America’s Cups many what-ifs? But along with the bad blood of the
1988 Big Boat v Stars & Stripes catamaran non-contest there also came a clear shout that the America’s Cup needed a kick towards the front of yacht technology. The Blue Arrow foiler, Conner’s wing sail cat and KZ-1 were boats testing their
designers’ and engineers’ creativity. It was like the pre-WW1 Universal Rule big class boats: extreme, exciting and pushing the whole sport forward. The 12 Metres had had their day. De
Savary was one of the prime movers behind a conference held in the Horton Grand Hotel in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter in which the who’s who of yacht designers went into a two-day conclave. The outcome was the new IACC rule. When trying to determine what the
product of the rating formula ought to be Derek Clark asked: ‘why not 42?’ As a Douglas Adams fan Clark knew that 42 was the answer to life, the universe and everything. From its initial impetus the Blue Arrow
campaign progressively unravelled, not least because of a Department of Trade & Industry inquiry into corporate gover- nance at Blue Arrow. Tony Berry had not referred the Canvey Island deal to his board. Berry was censured. De Savary was not. But the publicity surrounding the case had the consequence that funding had gone and finding a replacement corporate backer proved impossible. By the winter of 1991 the British team
was out of time and money. De Savary held a low-key briefing for half a dozen sailing journalists in a small Kensington mews house. It could not have been a greater contrast to the razzmatazz of the Victory launch. He talked gamely of his team sleep- ing in tents on San Diego’s beaches if needs be, but it was clear that this wasn’t even the final roll of the dice. The end had already been reached. Just the public fizzling-out was all that was left to play out. De Savary was an obituarist’s dream.
He did more in a year than most do in a lifetime. The obits are well worth a read. Of course the buccaneering showman
theme is the main narrative, and his extra- ordinary exploits from an early enforced departure from Charterhouse School to his varied fortunes-made and fortunes-lost are chronicled. What’s also evident from them is that decades on there are still big gaps in our knowledge of his business dealings. But also missing are the reminders that
beside the bombast there was a more private person of considerable charm, kindness and sensitivity.
SEAHORSE 41 q
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