The C&C Two-Tonner Evergreen was built for the light-airs Canada’s Cup and featured the culmination of sparmaker (and the boat’s helmsman) Tim Stearn’s drive to ever smaller mast sections. She was also probably the worst possible boat you could have taken to the very windy 1979 Admiral’s Cup. A lightweight and modestly ballasted centreboarder, Evergreen was built in a then advanced mix of carbon/epoxy/honeycomb and featured a super-slender Stearn rig which only remained aloft with vigorous use of a complicated array of hydraulic controls. Her hull and deck came out of the shop at 5,500lb, very light for the period. By the time she got to England Evergreen had been reconfigured further… but now with only 500lb of ballast in her centreboard plus 10,000lb of lead filling the bilge! The Canadian yacht fortunately withdrew early from that year’s violent Fastnet race. It was no surprise she finished 55th overall in an Admiral’s Cup fleet of 57 boats. What did surprise was that her alert crew somehow managed to get their fragile rig back home intact
curtailed when who should come up the Derwent but Bob Miller’s radical Ceil 3 to take the top prize on corrected time. It was during this trip that the seeds of
Pugh’s design career – and Reichel/Pugh – would be sown. While in Sydney he spent time with Californian offshore legend Skip Allen, racing the Gary Mull-designed Improbable. Allen’s name was to reappear often in Pugh’s later career trajectory. By 1975 Pugh was back in the US racing
the SORC again, this time with the ‘Mouth of the South’ Ted Turner on his red Frers 46 Tenacious. It was during the final reach into the finish of the Nassau Cup that Turner, being comfortably paced by a much smaller yellow One Tonner called Stinger, famously hollered over to her helmsman Dennis Conner, ‘How much do you want for that boat?’ ‘That boat’ was turning heads in more
than just Nassau – as overall winner of the SORC, at the time as important a series as the Admiral’s Cup for showing off new design and sailmaking talent, Stinger was being hailed as a new design paradigm from the drawing board of a little heard of Californian called Doug Peterson. Turner quickly bought the new boat and before long Pugh was racing onboard her. ‘Even though she had a really heavy
single spreader rig, Stinger was a break- through boat,’ says Pugh. With Ganbare before her, this boat helped usher in a new design era led by a wave of younger talent including Peterson, Ron Holland, Frers and a little later Englishman Ed Dubois.
48 SEAHORSE During this vibrant era in offshore
racing new ideas were being tried and discarded daily, often along with expen- sive rigs and sails… Take the heavy rig problem in the late 1970s: reducing alloy spar weight would pay off in added stability and reduced pitching in upwind sailing, a point of sail becoming more important with the new trend to inshore course racing. Sparmakers were going to smaller and smaller tube sections, adding more spreaders along with even more extreme means of shedding weight like chemically etching the tube walls and using brittle but lighter 7000-series alloys with glue and rivets in place of welding. The One Ton scene was getting intense
and there was one person always to be found around the latest new ideas. ‘I was in Newport for the US team trials for the Admiral’s Cup and I saw this guy on the dock trying to shorten his headstay [even that looked a little different from others of the day] and I offered to give him a hand. ‘This is where I met Lowell North,’ said
Pugh. ‘He was working on Dick Jenning’s Pied Piper, another Peterson design that had this radically thin mast section from Tim Stearns and an extruded alloy headstay that looked more aerodynamic than the others.’ This chance encounter with North would prompt Pugh’s move to San Diego where he’s been ever since. Besides Pied Piper Lowell had also been
involved with the 42ft Peterson-designed Two-Tonner Williwaw. Sparcraft in Costa Mesa, California, had built a mast for the
boat that was also dramatically slender for the size of yacht; in fact, it was a One Ton section, Lowell’s idea being to glue carbon fibre to the side panels to help stiffen the tube without adding much weight. As well as project managing the yacht’s
build, it was Pugh who was also handed the task of gluing the carbon to this mast tube, which did not often stick. But then this was a period of radical experimentation often followed by spectacular failure. ‘It was a great idea, in theory… but the
carbon rarely stuck to the metal and Lowell had me constantly trying to glue it back on in his sail loft,’ said Pugh. ‘But this never seemed to faze Lowell who only cared about chasing the next big thing.’ More importantly, Lowell had got Pugh
to California for the Williwaw programme and from there things started moving fast. Pugh soon met Doug Peterson in San Diego, by now one of the hottest design talents. A young Bill Tripp was also hired by Doug, as was one of Tripp’s classmates at the University of Michigan naval archi- tecture programme, John Reichel. Soon Pugh was part of this team too,
bringing input from racing the boats as well as project management skills to make sure Peterson boats kept winning. In quick succession Pugh had raced the SORC on Williwaw, then the Bermuda Race followed by the Two-Ton Worlds in Kiel. ‘1976 was a crazy time,’ he said. ‘Doug’s
office was a mess, piles of letters and deposit cheques lying around everywhere with little or no semblance of organisation.
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