World Sailing) had raced to third in the National 12’s premier event, The Burton Cup. ‘We got into Mr Chips and, wow! the difference,’ remembers Keith. ‘It meant all our hard work paid off. We just flew!’ Austin ‘Clarence’ Farrar, a hugely influ-
ential sailor and sailmaker, wrote in Yachts & Yachting’s 14 September 1956 edition: ‘The Sir William Burton Cup race, sailed this year in Weymouth Bay, was won in convincing style by 18-years-old Keith Musto of Thames Estuary YC in a record fleet of 144 starters.’ From Sea Scouts to one of the most
prestigious UK titles in three years was a big signifier of the talent and determina- tion of what was to come from Keith Musto. Next it was into the singlehanded Finn. The boat Ken Pearce bought was one that Jeremy Rogers had built while an apprentice at Chippendale’s original boat- shop in Fareham. ‘The first time I sailed at Westcliff was in
a confused wind-against-tide chop and I got up to Canvey Point and found I couldn’t turn around and bear away,’ remembers Keith, ‘thinking, “I don’t care if I break the mast. I amgoing to turn around.” ‘Sure enough, it did break. Now I
thought how this won’t go down well with the friend who just bought me the boat. But it was a lesson learnt. I had to ease the main far more than I imagined when you pull the helm up. It was very different from the National 12…’ Being Essex-based but with the best
winter sailing for the Finn fleet in the Solent at Lymington created a 150-mile problem. Keith had no car or trailer. The solution was for a friend at Thorpe Bay to tow the Finn down while he travelled each weekend with Gill on her Lambretta scooter. At 10½ stone (65kg) and five foot eight
and a half, Keith was not ideal Finn weight. But he could hang on upwind and make gains downwind. He scored a 16th in the Finn Gold Cup in Hellerup in 1959 and was seventh a year later at Torquay. Competing in Paul Elvstrøm’s home
town started Musto’s keen interest in fit- ness. Though a little shorter these days, his waist size has not gone up, or his trimness gone down, for decades.
52 SEAHORSE
Elvstrøm himself had, famously, built a
hiking bench in the garage of his Hellerup house to hone his own race fitness. Although Musto was finished with the
Finn, it didn’t stop him geeing up ‘jolly good sailors’ around the country to think about the Olympics. It was these twin interests in Olympic sailing and fitness that would coalesce in the Flying Dutchman class which, Finn aside, was the only non- keel boat on the Games roster for 1964. Keith had already had an FD taster
when he was staying with Whitstable YC mainstay Doc Horran. Whitstable, on the Kent side of the Thames estuary, was the hotspot for the Flying Dutchman class. Horran and his wife urged Keith and Tony to have a go in their FD following a day’s racing in the Hornet Nationals. ‘We almost fell overboard laughing! How do two lightweights sail this thing?’ But a seed was sown. Musto and Morgan
won the Hornet Nationals in K-553, Starline, at Whitstable in 1960, the same year Wheeler and Morgan had won the Worlds in the same boat in Copenhagen. Thorpe Bay was Hornet class central, with many a famous/infamous name in the mix during the 1960s and 1970s: Kit Hobday, Beecher Moore, Bob Fisher, Colin McKen- zie, Dave Derry, Ian Gray, Doug Bishop. Keith persuaded Wheeler and Morgan
to go and look at Lady C, an oldish but decent FD from Itchenor, which they purchased. When Terry Wheeler finally decided he couldn’t commit to Olympic sailing Morgan turned to Musto and said: ‘Well! You got us into this, you’d better come and sail it!’ Musto and Morgan were both relatively
small, the latter an inch or two taller and maybe a few pounds heavier. Keith’s analysis was searing. ‘We’ve got to get fit!’ In Morgan he’d found a match, someone already able to tuck his legs under the Hor- net’s sliding seat and hike straight out and whose interest in sailing was purely physical. Morgan had no interest in the tactical or technical aspects of it, but he thrived on giving racing his all. Training was anathema to most ama-
teur sportsmen at the time, sailing being no different. But Keith looked in at Benfleet’s
local school, tracked down the PE teacher, told him of their ambitions and what each of them did on the FD. He set them up with a series of exercises that they could do at home. ‘He said, “If you do that for the next three years you’ll win a medal!” Unfortunately, I misheard the guy and didn’t realise you rested for a minute between each circuit. I was knackered.’ Musto and Morgan added swimming
and running to the mix for stamina as well as squash for reaction training for speed and tactics. They trained every day with no exceptions for Christmas and New Year, only cutting the training down to two circuits ahead of events to keep energy and strength in the bank. ‘I remember trying to gauge how strong
our competitors were, arm wrestling with Hans Fogh,’ recalls Keith. Oddly for something that was soon to
become fundamental to Olympic success – think of Musto and Morgan’s successor in the FD class, Rodney Pattisson, and the extraordinary intensity of his campaigning – the pair were still looked down upon. Lancelot ‘Slotty’ Dawes was wealthy
from shipping, and was instrumental in turning Whitstable into a key stop for Fly- ing Dutchman sailing. He had helmed the British FD in 1960 at the Rome Olympics and later served as the class’s international president, ‘but he described our training as unsporting’, remembers Keith. Other FD sailors, such as Johnson
Wooderson, caught on, ‘but they had heavier crew and I don’t think they approached fitness in the way I think they should have done.’ While Musto and Morgan found they
were competitive in heavier air thanks to fitness, plus Keith’s instinctive mastery of sheeting the main harder as the wind increased to bend the mast and open the leech, reaching was their forte on the old- style Olympic triangle courses with their reaches to and from the 90° gybe mark. Believing their old boat wouldn’t be
good enough for the Olympic regatta in Enoshima in the following year, they decided a new one was needed. This posed a big problem for Musto and Morgan. How to afford it?
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