Hit them with a feather
With his line-honours win on Yandoo Comanche in the 2022 Hobart race
Australian yachtsman John Winning transcended any pigeonholing purely as a ‘great skiffie’. Nevertheless, he is one of the foremost skiff racers of all time, as well as being singularly responsible for much of the 18-footer class’s prosperity, and at times its survival, in the past 40 or more years. But his line-honours success in a very different arena sent Blue Robinson off to knock on the great man’s front door and learn a little more about a humble yachtsman who has a very loud story to tell…
I could put it off no longer, our editor had been banging on at me for longer than I care to remember to have a proper sit- down with this great Australian yachts- man, supporter of women’s and youth sailing and widely respected businessman. When he took line honours in the last
Sydney Hobart Race – racing a 100ft supermaxi and therefore slap bang in the centre of Seahorse territory – I was clean out of excuses. So here is John ‘Woody’ Winning’s story in his own words.
42 SEAHORSE
From Cadets to 12s I was born in Crown Street Women’s Hospital late June 1952. I was lucky to grow up not far from the water with the family home here in Sydney. My dad and my uncle both sailed already, my grand - father having moved to Vaucluse in 1913. Dad was born in 1921 and the Vaucluse Skiff Club was formed in 1926… When- ever possible they would head down to the beach asking for a ride and often get out on the 12ft skiffs as bailer boys. These boats were the smaller versions of the 18-footers – open boats with ‘overcrowded’ sail areas. Some had primitive bailers that we called snorkels – tapered things with a cork from a sherry bottle in the top as a stopper – so that probably signalled the end of the bailer boys, I guess, in the late 1950s. These were the only dinghies around
really at that time. There were a few Cadets – my dad had one – but mostly it was 12s, and you’d always have 80-odd boats racing in the State Championships. What happened then was Sylvester (Sil)
Rohu commissioned Charles Sparrow to design the Vaucluse Junior (VJ), as he was concerned that teenagers had little to do during the Great Depression. My dad was right in that target age
group for a two-person dinghy in 1932, when he was 11. And that VJ fleet just
took off as they could be righted after a capsize and simply built in a garage. Sil himself had enlisted and fought on
the Western Front, including Ypres, Pass- chendaele and the Somme in the 7th Field Artillery Brigade. Their unit patch is the red and blue oval, plus he was the editor of a weekly magazine they put out while on service during the First World War, and the magazine was called Yandoo – the indigenous word meaning ‘messenger’. Those kids – they were kids really at 19
and 20 – going to war to fight, bought a secondhand typewriter in Durban on their way to England with the convoy, and drove the Pommy soldiers mad with their tapping away making this magazine! Yandoo documented the history of the
fighting. They were quite something, pro- ducing 1,200 copies of each issue using that typewriter and a wax duplicator, which froze in the trenches in France in the winter; that same typewriter is now at the National War Memorial in Canberra. So that is the origins of Yandoo. Sil
Rohu called all his 12ft skiffs Yandoo and when he died quite young in 1945, my dad had VJs designed by Sil and took over the name Yandoo as a mark of respect. Sil is an important character here. He
was a great clubman – a doer. Most clubs run well because of a good secretary or
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