Eventually, beam restrictions were lifted


at the League in 1951 and both 6ft and 7ft- beam boats raced together until the bigger boat once again phased itself out. All three of the major Australian 18-Footer clubs were back together once again. The smoothing-out process was helped


greatly by the leading skippers of the time, Bill Barnett, Norman Wright Jr and Lance Watts. Most of the new ideas and champ - ionship contenders of the period came from the designs and sheds of these three dedicated designer/builder/skippers. The first world champion boat to come


from the talents of these Australian 18- footer greats was Myra Too, which won the 1951 title in Sydney for her creator and skipper Bill Barnett. Myra Too had a ‘bend back’ mast rather in the style of the


curved-topmast 12 Metres of the 1980 America’s Cup – which similarly allowed a greater roach in the top of the sail. One year later, at Fiji’s Royal Suva


Yacht Club, New Zealand’s Peter Mander progressed the design and innovation in the 18-footers to the next level at the 1952 Giltinan World Championship. Mander’s new championship-winning 18, Intrigue, featured a cold-moulded round-bilge carvel-planked hull of 5/16in edge-glued western red cedar over Japanese oak ribs. Intrigue also had a fuller, more buoyant hull shape than the relatively narrow Australian 18s and weighed in at around 250lb compared to the 400lb Australian boats. An enormous percentage saving. Intrigue also introduced the idea of having two of her five-man crew on


trapeze wires, which it was claimed at the time ‘enabled one man to virtually have the leverage of two’. By the 1954 world championship all the New Zealand boats had these so-called trapeze men (they mostly carried three men on the wire, occasionally four), along with the new swivelling masts and rig attachments. Meanwhile, the hulls quickly moved to


faster-to-build and lighter cold-moulded construction with two or three skins of diag- onally laid planking. Across the Tasman the Sydney and Brisbane boat owners were soon building similar boats and these simpler, lighter designs quickly became prevalent. When Norman Wright saw the advan-


tages of the ideas used on the 1952 and 1954 world champion, Intrigue, he used them when he built Jenny VI, a three-layer 


SEAHORSE 57


IMAGES TOM CUNEO/AUSTRALIA MARITIME MUSEUM/WILLIAM HALL


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