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A teams and B teams, and the success of the class is how well you look after the B teams. If they decide they have had enough and don’t turn up, then all of a sudden your fleet is half its size. So we stared the Corinthian class, a function of the number of professional sailors and age allowance. All this meant that the B teams were now having the fun that they weren’t having before. More recently – but for the same reason – Terry Wetton and I sat
down and he produced a rule we are using in the current TP fleet, which is a function of all the factors, including encouraging women and youth sailors onboard. This rule has been running for around 18 months and it is doing well. At the Port Stephens regatta we had 11 TP52s – it is impressive to get that number of boats on a startline in Australia. And now the same tailored handicap system has been adopted by the North American TP fleet. That said, what interests me in fleet racing is winning – full stop.
What isn’t that much fun is the cost, but it is what it is. In terms of crew I try to adopt what I have done in business for the past 50 years. The crew is everything, and they will only be good if they train. However, the B teams never did any training – they turned up on
a Saturday and wondered why they weren’t in the game. I am not the key player in the crew – any silly bugger can steer a boat, it isn’t that difficult. What is difficult is to steer it really well. So my focus is to have a very good tactician and meteorologist. Roger ‘Clouds’ Badham has been doing my weather for ever! Forty years! I was navigating Hammer of Queensland on a Mooloolaba race
– and Clouds said that late in the afternoon, if there is cloud in the west, there may be breeze offshore. There was, and I suggested we go offshore, to howls of protest from the Apollo crewmembers who were racing with us. The owner, Arthur Bloore, said, ‘Marcus makes the calls!’ We were 20 miles behind the lead boat; next morning we were 20 in front. That is what Clouds’ skill is all about. Coming up to date, I went to New Zealand to look at options for
building my latest TP52. I took Victor Kovalenko, Terry Wetton and Monty, who is my boat captain, and we spoke to sailmakers and boatbuilders and then I decided to build there, with Don Cowie, who races on Sled, as my project manager. I wanted to get everyone together in one room before we left and tell them about my decision, and so I asked Don to book a table at the RNZYS, and he couldn’t – as he had resigned, along with 400 other people when they decided to take the Cup to Barcelona! Funny buggers, those Kiwis! In making the decision about the new TP, I believe the Kiwis are
way ahead of the rest of the world in two areas. Firstly, in building the boat, and second the technology in the boat. My plan was to build the fastest, lightest and strongest TP52 in the world. Technically it is not a TP, as I couldn’t race it in the Med fleet
without some changes. Mine is an inshore boat as I don’t want to go offshore any more; I’ve done all that. The last time I sat on the rail for any period of time was in the 2003 Admiral’s Cup, on Bob Oatley’s Wild Oats 66, where I did the races he couldn’t do. So I am sitting on the bloody rail and it was miserable! The guys called me the ‘Offshore Strategist’, which meant ‘Marcus, sit there and do nothing’ – 350 miles sitting on the rail to Wolf Rock and back on a two-sail reach cured me for ever and a day, I can tell you… Anyway, back to my first boat, which I bought from Bob Oatley
and renamed The Manly Ferry. I won the chocolate box division at Hamilton Island Race Week, in 1983 I think, and so that was pretty exciting and that started the more serious stuff. I then bought the Mumm 36 and had some success there too. We had a great regatta in NZ and we rented a big house – it was
the 2018 Millennium Cup, probably the best regatta I have ever done, fantastically well-organised up in the beautiful Bay of Islands. It was there we won a timber gig rowing race! Our crew rowed this old wooden dinghy and won a beautifully made little oak barrel of grog! During that Millennium Cup we were going down to have our morn-
ing swim, and one of my crew is coming up the hill after a long night, and he could hardly walk he was so full of beer. So I grabbed my crew boss and said that bloke is off the boat – now. The responsibility for me is huge. Imagine if we had a prang – ‘but, Mr Blackmore, you knew that crewmember was drunk…’ The vast majority of the
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crew appreciate both what I do and what I provide, and the day that it isn’t appreciated that is it, I will go off and do something else. I have done plenty of Dragon sailing as well. I bought two, one kept
at the Squadron here and one in Europe. The most memorable race in the Dragon was at the start of a season in Portugal, where they started us in 25kt and huge seas. I am roaring round the bottom mark and as I come up I clipped the transom of the boat in front – and I looked up, and to my horror, I saw a big gold crown painted on the back of their boat… it was Prince – now King Frederik of Denmark! But he is a lovely guy and of course we then became mates. When we did the Admiral’s Cup we also met Juan Carlos, King
of Spain. He won more races than we did on Wild Oats X, but the races we won were double or triple points. So that won us the Admiral’s Cup in 2003. It sat in our club for a long time – RORC got pissed off as they wanted the trophy back, but Bob said no – win it back! With the TP52s I got attracted by the whole class. I went to Europe
and got a sail on the Kiwi boat as a guest. Then I bought my first boat from Team NZ. I sat down with Grant Dalton and told him I had done my homework and I would like to buy his boat. The deal would be that I would pay a deposit now – at the start of the Med Cup season – and they would deliver the boat to me at the season’s end. Grant said that would be perfect, as they are building a new boat for the following season. I reckon that is one of the greatest shonks of yachting, that the designers go to an owner and say, ‘If we shave a bit off here, and a bit there in the next design, I reckon that is half a boat length at the top mark…’ And all the other owners say, ‘Well, I better have a new one as well then!’ What this meant to us was the secondhand boats that arrived
in Australia from that series were excellent. The Kiwis were fantastic to deal with. They shipped the boat to Australia at no cost, then I had two of their team sail with us to help get us up to speed. We just won everything… we could actually miss the start and still win! That boat was so well set up… I remember our first offshore race
and Tom Slingsby was our tactician. I was driving, and he said to me, ‘Marcus, the next shift is down, but the shift after that one is up, and so I just want you to push through this first one…’ Well, I looked upwind for myself and I cannot see a bloody thing! Amazing sailors, most from Lake Macquarie – brilliant! Tommy,
Nathan (Outteridge). And Will Ryan – I have sailed with a lot of people in my life and Will Ryan is the nicest bloke I have ever met. We had an incident at a European regatta and Will said to me that we should protest them; I said, Will, the owner is a really nice guy and he is also sponsoring the regatta! A protest won’t change the outcome and I would rather not, so Will went over and had a quiet chat with his tactician; Will gave the bloke a lesson in sailing and the bloke thanked him! I was standing to one side laughing my head off! I have had three TP52s, the Kiwi’s boat was the first, and my
second I bought from the Argentinians with a similar deal. I didn’t have as much success with that boat because the fleet had started to lift here in Australia. Knowing that boat speed is everything, for my latest boat I looked around and I couldn’t find a good secondhand boat coming out of Europe, so I spoke to ‘Flipper’ Paul Westlake, and he said, ‘Marcus, you could always build one…’ And I said that was a great way of tearing up money! But we went to NZ, talked to all these guys and the fascinating
thing was they all knew each other well – they were very close-knit. I wanted to build something slightly different, with significant tech- nology. So we eventually got them all together at the RNZY Squadron and I told them what I wanted. I did like that they all knew each other, and one bloke said, ‘Yes – and we probably dated the other bloke’s wife at some stage!’ Before they were married of course… In terms of designer, I used the same designer from my first two
TPs, Adolfo Carrau at Botín. The relationship is good and I enjoy his company and he tipped me off about that first Team NZ boat. He said. ‘Marcus, just go and buy that boat.’ Which cut him out of a design project, but he has done this one so I reckon he is doing OK. They started to build the boat and we went over to have a look
and I asked what that other boat was doing sitting in the corner of the yard. It was a Reichel/Pugh 52… but a bit different from what
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