Opposite: Carl Ryves laughs as he shows off the replica he made of the rudder of Ben Lexcen’s legendary breakthrough 18-foot skiff Taipan showing off the fences and endplate Lexcen incorporated when the boat was built in 1959… with Ryves’ own loudly scrawled reminder that his great friend had first added wings to foils as long ago as 1956. So when in 1983 rivals to Lexcen’s 12 Metre design Australia II were busy claiming he could not have come up with the 12 Metre’s keel wings on his own… suffice to say that Carl Ryves was unimpressed. And (above) taking a modern Flying Dutchman out for a spin in Sydney when the FD Worlds came to town in 2014. Ryves and crew Dick Sargeant finished fourth at the 1968 Mexico Games… their home-built FD slowly coming apart underneath them
Highlands and raced it on the reservoir on light days, reflecting that Carl had often sailed it in the afternoons at Lane Cove, something his good friend Ben Lexcen did too, just for fun. Over tea with Carl, eventually the talk would always come back
to Benny. Ben Lexcen – Carl’s great friend, who adopted the Ryves family as a teenager to find stability after never knowing his father, and his mother abandoning him to battle her own demons. This meant Benny (who was Bob Miller back then before changing his name) was passed around from aunties and uncles to grandparents, a difficult time for a child who would have felt like a scruffy, unwanted package. In his teens and working for the railways as an apprentice fitter
and turner, Benny travelled down to Sydney intrigued about the International Stars based at Pittwater and Hunters Hill, plus the new Flying Dutchman fleet. He then gravitated to the Ryves house- hold where he stayed, sleeping in the lounge or out on the veranda, washing his jeans while wearing them in the shower – where he also played the harmonica, because he liked the acoustics of the shower cubicle… Carl’s parents nourished him both physically and mentally; mum
fed him and dad had a library of technical books by Uffa Fox on light- weight planing dinghies and yacht design – including past and current America’s Cup lines. Plus of course there was Manfred Curry’s book, Yacht Racing – The Aerodynamics of Sails and Racing Tactics, first published in Germany in 1925 then in English in 1928, with chapters on aircraft wing profiles, various sail configurations and the resistance of air and water, bendy booms and a now famous photograph of a sheet of ice in the middle of a river, naturally shaped
by the water flow to a perfect foil shape. I have a copy of this remark- able book in front of me now, with images of a wind tunnel chamber and measuring apparatus in Dessau, and the author’s designed jib outrigger – with its correct trimming guide. Carl credits this book in helping Benny with the theory of sailing
in his early days, fascinating the young Lexcen who devoured these ideas and concepts, storing them up in his inquisitive mind until he was allowed to run free with his theories, to become what the Australia II skipper John Bertrand would call ‘the Leonardo da Vinci of Australia’. In 1955 Carl Ryves’ father built him a Star, but constructed as
a cruising boat with a hardwood keel and Oregon planking, roved together and inevitably overweight. Most of the Australian boats built prior to the 1956 Olympics were all cedar-framed and so significantly lighter. Carl’s boat floated about four inches below everyone else’s, but
he raced this heavy boat, beating most of the older guys. He called them ‘older’, because Carl was about 15 himself and really had never raced before, perhaps a couple of times as crew on a Vaucluse Junior, but remarkably little. Recounting those days, he was very honest, ‘I never really knew where the wind came from, Blue! I just sort of concentrated really – and it all seemed to come together!’ Carl blossomed, winning championships and getting noticed,
eventually representing Australia at the 1968 Mexico Olympics in the Flying Dutchman class with crew Dick Sargeant, building his own boat, mast and boom with his father, and making their own sails on the lounge floor at Hunters Hill. They sailed well in Acapulco, but up against the might of Rodney Pattisson and the more
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