News Around the World


NEW ZEALAND Being trapped by a rampaging kangaroo in an Australian outback motel room is hardly one of the sailing-related hazards you would expect Tony Rae to have faced in an extraordinary career that spans six round-the-world races and seven America’s Cups. This long-hidden episode in an adventurous career came to light


during a period of reflection as New Zealand celebrated two momen- tous sailing milestones: the 30th anniversary of Steinlager 2’s epic victory in the 1989-90 Whitbread Round the World Race; and the 25th anniversary of NZL-32’s 5-0 whitewash of Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes crew to capture the 1995 America’s Cup. Tony Rae sailed in both of those landmark campaigns, but it was


an earlier event that brought him face to face with an enraged kangaroo in his motel room. Rae was part of the road crew supporting Peter Blake and Mike Quilter sailing the then-radical trimaran Stein- lager I in the 1988 Round Australia Race. Rae’s road companions were Godfrey Cray, Ross Field and David Allan-Williams, who designed the 18m trimaran with its wing mast. ‘We had to keep track of the boat as it sailed around Australia in case anything went wrong,’ Rae recalls. ‘We had to stay as close to the coast as possible all the way around, so we spent quite a bit of the time off-road. ‘It is actually quite a big country,’ he says, with studied under-


statement. ‘We drove about 15,000km. It was a logistical nightmare. Drive all day, stop for the night, drive all day. A lot of it was on roads that stretched out dead straight across the desert as far as the eye could see. There was great excitement if we came across a slight bend! We got stuck in the sand, all kinds of dramas.’ The kangaroo encounter came during an overnight stop. ‘They


are really mean, aggressive creatures and a lot bigger than you think,’ Rae says. ‘I was terrified.’ Worse still, Rae is known for his legendary love of breakfast. He once won a radio competition for eating 46 Weetabix biscuits in a single sitting and his only regret was discovering there were still two left in the box. So his kangaroo ordeal was made much worse when he finally escaped from his motel room, only to be told by his unsympathetic travel companions that it was time to hit the road. Too bad, he had missed breakfast. If it was tough going on land, Blake and Quilter were not having


it easy at sea either. They very nearly lost the boat on the first night and the race went on to exact a heavy toll: two multihulls capsized, two monohulls wrecked and a life lost. Blake confessed he ‘never thought we would finish’ and described the event as a survival exercise more than a race. Steinlager I finished five days ahead of the rest of the fleet, but both Blake and Quilter were severely shaken by the experience. ‘Never again,’ vowed Quilter. After the race Blake flew back to Auckland where Brad Butterworth


and Kevin Shoebridge were overseeing the construction of Steinlager 2 for the Whitbread Race. Quilter, Field, Tony Rae and his father, Olympic sailor Murray Rae, delivered the tri back across the Tasman. But what should have been a five-day crossing took a couple of weeks after the forward section of the port hull sheared off mid-ocean. The four crew had to plug the hole with a semi-inflated dinghy


held in place with a sailcloth bandage as they limped back to Auck- land. ‘It was a long haul getting back,’ says Rae. ‘The strange part was that the media coverage from the delivery trip was huge, bigger than the race itself. Blakey laughed about that. He said the publicity from the Tasman drama paid for the whole campaign.’ What struck Rae most vividly at the time of the Steinlager I project


was the breadth of Blake’s vision and ambition, particularly as pro- fessional sailing was just in its infancy. This was first outlined when Blake visited Fremantle to talk to some of the crew involved in New Zealand’s first America’s Cup campaign back in 1987. ‘He spoke to us about being part of the Steinlager 2 Whitbread campaign. We all thought that sounded fantastic,’ said Rae, who had already done his first round-the-world race with Blake on Lion NZ. ‘But it was much bigger than that. He had in mind three projects,


each of which was ambitious in its own right: the Steinlager I tri- maran, the Whitbread and then Steinlager 3, which was intended for a Jules Verne challenge. To contemplate three projects of that scale was unbelievable – and he achieved them all.’


28 SEAHORSE At that stage Blake had no interest in the America’s Cup, which


he considered a claustrophobic affair riddled with politics and questionable ethics. However, as history shows, he went on to tackle that one as well, leading New Zealand’s first successful bid for the Auld Mug in 1995 and the first successful defence of the Cup outside the USA in 2000. Separated by 10 days, the anniversaries for Steinlager 2


(24 May) and Team New Zealand (14 May) were marked by media coverage in New Zealand and also by team reunions, rendered somewhat strange and muted by Covid-19 restrictions. The Team New Zealand event took place at a bar in Auckland’s Viaduct Basin with the group spread across two tables. ‘We could not really mingle and catch up with people. Russell [Coutts] was given a hard time for not turning up, but we got him on a Zoom call. The phone was passed around so he copped quite a bit of flak.’ If Rae was impressed by Blake’s vision back in the 1980s he


has come to appreciate it even more today as he embarks on trying to assist Bianca Cook in putting together the first fully Kiwi round- the-world race campaign in 30 years. ‘Blake tackled three big projects simultaneously. Here we are trying to get a single one- design project to the startline… and it is a real struggle.’ Cook completed the last Volvo Race with Dee Caffari’s Turn the


Tide on Plastic and got her proposed Ocean Race project off to a good start when she acquired the same boat and was first to register a formal entry. However, that early momentum was lost as a moun- tain of obstacles piled up. First, efforts to engage with potential New Zealand backers stopped short when the crucial announcement of Auckland as a stopover was delayed. By the time the course was confirmed the Christmas and January holidays meant boardrooms were in no mood to talk sponsorship. The next big banner-raising event was to be the relaunch of the boat, following an extensive refit. But the 25 March lockdown in New Zealand shut that down. The boat is still tucked in a shed while the world economy is


reeling and sport events, even as far off as the October 2021 Ocean Race start, face uncertainty. ‘We are all working on the basis that the race will start on schedule, but it is a very complicated scenario,’ says Rae. ‘Nine countries are involved. Will all the borders be open? Who knows? It’s fair to say we have faced some massive hurdles.’ Blake always used to shrug off apparently insurmountable


obstacles by saying if it was easy – everybody would be doing it. ‘That saying is coming back to haunt me right now,’ Rae laughs, ‘because it certainly isn’t easy. The thing that keeps me going is nobody says it is a bad idea. Everybody thinks it is fantastic. We just have to find a way of turning that into funding… The obstacles that are in the way right now are just a glitch – a bump in the road.’ Like when you find your motel room invaded by a rampaging


kangaroo, you just have to deal with it and move on – even if you miss breakfast. Ivor Wilkins


AUSTRALIA The quiet ones – Part 2 Seahorse Magazine: You said Oracle was a fantastic team to work with in Bermuda, but how was the boat… Ky Hurst:We obviously created what we thought was right with that overall package, but one thing we didn’t focus on was how simple we could have made the boat for Jimmy Spithill to drive compared to the ETNZ package, plus our foil choice. When you compared our foils to what the Kiwis were using ours were much thicker and of course that is just drag in a highly critical area. But it is a hard one for me, really on that highly technical aspect, I can’t comment. What I can say is that in my area everything worked smoothly and really well. So cockpit 1 and 2 worked seamlessly! SH: Before the 2017 Cup you must have had spies in Auckland… KY: We were getting information but obviously it wasn’t enough – we clearly didn’t have enough spies! They really got their package right, electing to go different from all the teams and arriving in Bermuda really close to the event. It was interesting, though; Graeme Spence and I flew to Utah 18 months before the Cup, and we did


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