Above: Godfrey Cray steers with Spanhake (right) riding shotgun as the overweight and unloved Lion New Zealand ploughs through the Southern Ocean in the 1985 Whitbread Round the World Race. After promising so much in the 1981 race with his light (but later dismasted) flyer Ceramco, for his next race Peter Blake was determined not to be undone by breakages so built a sturdy design, only to receive a taste of his own medicine when the new lighter designs sailed away – including line-honours winner Pierre Fehlmann’s fractional Farr maxi UBS and Lionel Péan’s pretty overall winner, Philippe Briand’s L’Esprit d’Equipe. Lion New Zealand did not even prove very reliable for a star-studded crew including Grant Dalton, Mike Quilter, Simon Gundry, Ed Danby, Glen Sowry and Tony Rae! Left: Paul Cayard steers Cup defender Young America in a hopeless battle against Team New Zealand’s much faster challenger in San Diego in 1995. Dennis Conner’s Stars&Stripes team won the defender trials on their own Bruce Nelson design – perceived as the slowest of three defence candidates – but for the Match they borrowed the faster Farr design of John Marshall’s Young America team
will say the best days of this event were in the post-1983 monohull period when teams were motivated to challenge in new venues and after 1987 in a new class of yachts as well. Many new nations entered the event, dwarfing the scale of today’s Cup contests – motivated not only by the potential of new commercial opportunities but also to showcase their hull, rig and sail designs. It is in this field that Fuzz worked as a
sail designer, trimmer and analyst, helping to propel the 1987 New Zealand Challenge to great results in the Louis Vuitton Cup on Kiwi Magic and – skippered by a young new boy called Chris Dickson – losing out only to Dennis Conner’s veteran Stars & Stripes team who went on to win the Cup. Next for Fuzz was another race around
the planet, this time with Grant Dalton onboard the Farr-designed maxi ketch Fisher & Paykel in the 1989/90 Whitbread, now designing as well as trimming sails. They finished runners-up to Peter Blake’s mighty Steinlager 2 which dominated that large 23-strong edition of the race. The AC experience in Fremantle put Fuzz in a prime position to assist America3 in their
Cup-winning programme in San Diego in 1992 on the new IACC yachts, assisting in
not only sail design and performance analysis, but co-ordinating two-boat testing and acting as a crew coach as well. Just imag- ine the pressures on a young if talented Kiwi embedded in a massive US America’s Cup team – it’s a testament to Fuzz’s versatility and amiability that he managed to navigate all the strong personalities associated with that enormous four-boat programme built by billionaire Bill Koch. Having now entered the USA scene,
Fuzz put his knowledge to work for Halsey Sailmakers in Connecticut for two years, who benefited from his technical knowl- edge to improve their sail design pro- grammes, quality control and customer sail selection process. It was in this time too that he joined
some of the best US racing programmes, quite often with a Kiwi connection: the 1992 Commodores’ Cup with Geoff Stagg on Gaucho, the breakthrough 44ft Farr design that changed everyone’s thinking about IMS design; the Mumm 36 Thomas- I-Punkt with Russell Coutts; and also with non-Kiwis Steve Benjamin on the Farr ILC 40 Pigs in Space and Peter Gilmour on Syd Fischer’s Farr 50 Ragamuffin, top boat in the 1993 Admiral’s Cup.
Having been on the winning US Amer-
ica’s Cup team in 1992, Fuzz came back to San Diego in another US team that chal- lenged to defend the trophy in 1995: the technically aggressive PACT 95 programme. Their IACC design, Young America, with the wild Roy Lichtenstein graphics, was fast, but lost out to Dennis Conner’s (slower) Stars&Stripes in the defender series, only to then be ‘borrowed’ back by Dennis and his helmsman Paul Cayard in the Cup finals in preference to their own design. PACT 95 did, however, lead the itiner-
ant Kiwi into a new position as a member of North Sails’ elite Performance Resource Group (PRG) who brought new skills and access to cutting-edge sail design tools to a wide mix of high-performance customers. Alongside this new role the alternating of
round-the-world races and America’s Cups rolled on, along with a sprinkling of Admi- ral’s Cups, Maxi Worlds and other events in between. Fuzz joined George Collins’ Whitbread 60 Chessie Racing programme in the 1997/98 Whitbread Race as watch captain and sailmaker, and in the next race in 2001/2002 as a sail designer and trimmer on the third generation of these boats, the Volvo 60 Tyco Racing.
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