Clockwise from below: after the debacle of Taipan being excluded from the 1960 worlds in its original guise, Bob Miller made no mistakes the following year when he poured all that he had learnt with his previous controversial craft but this time analysing the rulebook in minute detail. The result was Venom, which looks closer to a modern development dinghy like an Int 14 than anything seen before in the 18-footers. She was also lighter, stronger and faster than Taipan but still dripping in innovations including a pair of venturi self-bailers. Miller and his three-man crew won the 1961 title at a canter; Venom was followed by a period of steady refinement but with sail areas once again increasing, along with a return to four-man crews – until the launch in 1967 of Peter Nelson’s Kaiser Bill with its unusual stem head rig, lack of any bowsprit and very hard chined hull; to win the 1968 worlds in Auckland Ken Beashel created Daily Telegraph with a finer hull for the local chop and a small canard to prevent lee-helm caused by the use of bigger than normal headsails
after two more titles in the 70s), Bob Holmes was a small man and also chose to sail with a four-man crew (three on trapezes). And, he decided, he would carry the biggest, most powerful spinnakers ever seen in the fleet to combat the speed of the lighter three-handers off the wind. The biggest spinnaker carried on Holmes’ Travelodge skiff was said to be in excess of 1,300ft2 (no one ever knew for sure!). One notable exception to the round-bilge
Zealand’s Surprise, designed by Dave Marks, featuring a double-chine hull using two-sheet ply construction, which made it extremely light. Hull sections were finer than was usual at the time and the simple ply construction drove the forward shape into being deeply V-eed – but after a fairly brutal transition the aft run was long and very flat. The boat was a rocket, and from then till the end of the 1960s most new skiffs would be similarly built employing the same light – and cheap – construction. And, typically, one skiff designer/skipper
would push the new construction harder than anyone. Despite the problems Miller experienced in Auckland, there were few doubts about his basic design. Miller again teamed up with Wright to build an improved version which he would make both lighter and stronger than its predecessor. The new boat was named Venom. And
she was indeed stronger and lighter, just as Miller promised. Venom featured rounded topsides, plus small venturis in the hull with large transom cutouts to drain the boat out when planing. The fully battened main had a greater roach with spider-cut, large overlap genoa and 500ft2 kite. She was sailed by three crew with two on trapezes. Following TaipanMiller had also carried on with his experiments with rudder foils to improve efficiency. However, there had been no change to
the skiff class rules for NSW which main- tained its ban on this type of boat for local racing. But this time it did not matter – at the 1961 world championship Venom
dominated the racing and Miller’s crew won the series without breaking a sweat. Sydney’s champion designer, builder
and skipper Len Heffernan, who had won the 1958 JJ Giltinan World Championship on Jantzen Girl III, was also pivotal in the transition from the large-hulled, big sail- area carriers, with four or five-man crews to these smaller, lighter three-handers with moderate sail areas… that could also plane upwind for the first time. Despite the initial reluctance by the two
Sydney clubs to accept the three-handers, the Sydney Flying Squadron finally agreed to allow them to race at the club – but the League persisted with the traditional four- handers. In total Heffernan built six Taipan/Venom-style boats which were all cold-moulded with two skins of cedar angled at about 45°. They had a plywood floor and were round-bilged, although this was mainly for the sake of appearance! Ken Beashel had been a successful
16-footer skipper when he agreed to skipper one of the six boats that had been built by Heffernan. The boat was named Schemer, which Beashel sailed with a four- man crew and won the JJ Giltinan World Championship at Auckland in 1963. Beashel later said: ‘Lennie (Heffernan)
produced something in the four-hander he didn’t know he had. That boat was a better four-hander than she was a three-hander. She was too buoyant as a three-hander; she leaped out of the water too much.’ Three-time Giltinan World Champion during the 1960s (five-times champion
boats was the 1967-1968 Australian Cham- pionship-winning Kaiser Bill, designed by New Zealand’s Peter Nelson, which was a hard-chine boat featuring a stem-head rig, which was a big break with tradition. Ken Beashel won his second world title
in 1968, again in New Zealand, with Daily Telegraph, a boat he designed with a finer hull to handle the bumpy tidal chop on Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour. He also remembered a lesson he’d learnt five years earlier in 1963 with Schemer, to use a big headsail for sailing fast in rougher seas. Then to counter the tendency for the big headsail to pull the bow away and stop getting washed sideways while climbing a wave, he placed a small canard-type fin between the bow and the centrecase. By now the skiff design scene was
bubbling with new ideas and new names. The first indication of another potentially interesting new arrival came along shortly after Beashel’s 1968 success, when a young New Zealand designer named Bruce Farr gave an impressive performance in his new skiff, Guinness Lady, at the 1969 world championship on the Brisbane River. Farr skippered Guinness Lady into
third place but was unlucky not to be an even stronger challenger as gear failures in the first two races proved costly. He then recorded two wins and a second place in the final three races. As with Bob Miller, later Ben Lexcen following a trademark dispute, here was another new face in the dynamic 18-footers who would go on to much bigger things.
SEAHORSE 59
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