Proper wings… John Winning, Jay Harrison and Grant Pollitt racing Flora during the early 1980s. Soon the gains in power became so obvious that now the race for wider and wider racks was on and wingspans grew every race weekend… and quite often overnight. By now Channel 7 had also come in as a committed broadcaster for the racing as well as sponsor of Iain Murray’s five-times world champion crew, and with their promotional power spectator interest also exploded as onshore audiences of 10,000 became the norm. Of course with the growth in interest came a growth in budgets, wings grew more, new materials and build methods came in and the arms race was rolling… until it all spiralled out of control in the early ’90s. At which point there was a complete reset with the move to one-design hulls – assisted and when necessary funded by John Winning. No wonder he is still held up as the ‘godfather’ of the fleet
designs for four and then three crew, and were really the boats to get… until Iain Murray came onto the scene. On the first Travelodge I sailed John
‘Steamer’ Stanley was my forward hand, plus Ian ‘Percy’ Perdriau. Work was all consuming, but I wasn’t married so it was all work in the week and then the week- ends were free. I also got a bit involved in ocean racing
with various boats, to give the teams a bit of a leg-up!! I raced on Ballyhoo but with- out overcommitting as the skiffs were the priority. I did a Hobart race on Jack Rooklyn’s Apollo II in 1974 and then the 1976 Hobart on Ballyhoo, taking the gun, then ’77 again on Apollo shortly before she was wrecked on Lady Elliot reef. I did the 50th Hobart on Love & War
with Peter Kurts, after which I thought I was done doing Hobart races – well, that didn’t happen, did it! Ballyhoo was a great boat, designed to
win the Transpac, yet it wasn’t a down- wind flyer… It did, however, go well upwind! One of the first real raceboats that created its own apparent wind. The big ketches and schooners – when it
was calm they sort of stalled. I remember we did the Catalina Island Race before the Transpac on Ballyhoo with designer Bob Miller onboard (before he changed his name to Ben Lexcen). There was no breeze at all – and the next minute we are doing
44 SEAHORSE
6 or 7kt to windward! We really only had 2kt of breeze, so we would get the boat moving at 1kt, that would turn into 3kt then it would lift to 5kt then 7kt. Bob Miller was great to sail with – just
great, and a funny, funny man. With some incredible talent. He had an early Hewlett- Packard computer onboard – and he would fiddle with it and somehow made it all work. My dad sailed against him in Solings. He was a great man. So I guess I first sailed the 18s from
1975 through to when (son) Herman was young – and he is 38 now. Iain Murray’s first year was my second
year, 1976-77. By the fourth year when we sailed against the Big Fella in New Zealand we thought we had very much the same boat. But we had S-Glass and foam, he had carbon pre-preg. So then we had carbon wet lay-up… Iain was cooking his in the oven. Not that we knew at the time! We beat him in Perth in a couple of
races where Richard Court had put the bigger wings on… and then everyone put wings on. Heading over to NZ for that event I put a different system on, with a sliding frame that we changed to add a lock-pin to hold them. The guys thought I had two heads on me – but we went OK. We were all working full-time so we flew
to NZ at midnight and were racing the next day! Big Fella and his guys had been there for days… But the Big Fella is a genius
really. He knew we had his measure and so he redesigned what he was doing with four rigs… I later ended up with his old boat and we made those big wings a bit bigger still.
Wings The history of the wings was that Bruce Farr designed the boat with a flared deck out to 8ft 2in, the legal width for towing the boats behind a car. We had a race on the 18-footer Pacific Harbour tour and one of my crew had an accident at work cutting his hand, so we grabbed a bloke and went a lot better – much quicker than we had been… The difference was this new bloke was 6in taller and a bit heavier, so we knew we had to go wider. And just how much difference that would make. We made our first short frame out of
1in tube, and bolted that through the top- sides which made us another 4in wider each side – that worked, so the next thing was a frame that would socket in and then take it out when we were towing. They were only 6in, so again pretty small. Richard Court saw what I was up to,
and he put a big sliding frame on his boat. We got to Perth and were laughing our heads off at him… Then in the first race we all got to the top mark in a group a little ahead of Richard, and then he came in like a rocket from a lay-line and rounded 30 seconds ahead of all of us. Fortunately, they capsized on the run –
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