Above: when the Laurie Davidson stern treatment on Keith Randle’s IOR 45-footer (the former Shockwave) was protested out after winning the first four races in the San Francisco Big Boat Series, Randle took a chainsaw to his boat in the night and then went out and won the final race. Left: the 2000 America’s Cup in Auckland and NZL-60 with Davidson’s innovative snub bow comfortably see off Italy’s Prada Luna Rossa in five straight races. Prada designer Doug Peterson worked closely with Davidson on the 1995 New Zealand challenge so by now there was an edge to the rivalry… By the Cup Match Prada, under instruction from Patrizio Bertelli, had already replaced the original bow with this fuller treatment, but it was the whole package not just one element of it that made Team NZ impossible to beat
New Zealand Half Ton Championship with Davidson sailing onboard. Seven years later, when New Zealand
was captivated by very lightly built centre- board IOR boats, much to the horror of northern hemisphere measurers, Bouzaid returned to Davidson for a second Half- Tonner. This was the legendary Waverider, which won the Half Ton Cup in Poole in 1978, and then, following modifications to comply with changes in the rule, defended its title the following year in Germany, an unprecedented achievement at the time. During the IOR heyday Californian
Concrete to set up his professional yacht design studio Davidson purchased one of the same Olivetti machines for his own use. This early adoption of computer technol-
ogy belies a popular image of Davidson as a Luddite – an image he did nothing to dis- courage. During his time at Team New Zealand (1995 to 2000) he took pride in a cartoon that portrayed him sitting on top of a desktop computer while he pencilled lines by hand on a traditional drawing board. The caption read ‘Computer Aided Design’. But both Brett Bakewell-White and
Kevin Dibley, two other talented New Zealand designers who worked closely with Davidson for nine and 30 years respectively, testified that he fully under- stood the value of computer assistance, but preferred getting others to run the soft- ware and generate drawings. ‘I never met somebody as passionate
about boats as Laurie,’ said Bakewell- White, who first worked with Davidson during the 1987 New Zealand Challenge America’s Cup campaign in 12 Metres. ‘He was completely self-taught and his
bible was a 1938 edition of Skene’s Ele- ments of Yacht Design. The key to his
designs was Skene’s curve of areas and the wave form theory as proposed by Colin Archer in 1877, which at its heart relates the distribution of volume in a hull to the flow of water past it. He never wavered from it. ‘Aesthetics were also important to him.
He was a classicist in many ways, follow- ing established ideas of sheerlines and proportion. He studied the work of people like Herreshoff and Watson. Laurie’s boats had a subtlety and delicacy about them that set them apart.’ Kevin Dibley formed a working partner-
ship with Davidson in 1992 which contin- ued for the remainder of his working life and will continue with the handling of Davidson’s portfolio moving forward. Dibley describes Davidson as highly intu- itive. ‘He could see the boat in three dimen- sions in his mind’s eye long before it went down on paper. And he could visualise how water would flow across the hull.’ Following his ferro-cement period
Davidson’s first commission as a profes- sional yacht designer was a Half-Tonner, Blitzkrieg, for Tony Bouzaid, brother of Chris Bouzaid. Blitzkrieg won the 1971
John MacLaurin became another impor- tant client, building five Davidson- designed boats, all called Pendragon. The first was designed as a Three Quarter Tonner, which won the 1978 Three Quarter Ton Cup in Canada. Then would follow one of the most remarkable design tales of the IOR era… Almost overnight, subsequent changes
made to the IOR rule rendered MacLaurin’s purple yacht out of contention as a Three Quarter Tonner. But Davidson was not easily put off. Knowing that the following year’s One Ton Cup would be raced in the light airs of Newport Rhode Island, he drew up some dramatic modifications to allow Pendragon to rate as an undersized ‘pocket’ One Tonner. Sure enough, the ‘new’ Pendragon duly won the 1979 One Ton Cup, the only yacht ever to win two different Ton Cup classes. The fourth Pendragon, a 52-footer
launched in 1998, inspired the TP52 class. As Californian designer Bill Lee recalled, during broad-ranging discussions about the ideal characteristics for a new grand prix class, the breakthrough came when someone said: ‘Hey, you guys, this is
SEAHORSE 45
PHIL UHL
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116
