Admiral’s Cup reunion at CYCA

by Peter Campbell on 2 Nov 2010 What do octogenarian yachtsman Gordon Ingate and a much younger Mark Richards have in common? The answer: Both skippered most successful yachts in the once great Admiral’s Cup in England, Ingate at the helm of Caprice of Huon in 1965 and, 40 years later, Richards helming Wild Oats to a team victory in 2005.

Both yachtsman are expected to be among the many great Australian sailors from around the nation who will accept an invitation to an Admiral’s Cup re-union dinner at the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia on Thursday, 18 November. It’s an appropriate venue, as the CYCA was the driving force behind Australia’s first challenge for the Admiral’s Cup in 1965.

That year the Australian team of Caprice of Huon, Freya and Camille finished second overall, with Ingate’s Caprice of Huon the outstanding individual yacht of the event, based at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, arguably the mecca of English yachting since the 1830s. Two years later, Caprice of Huon, this time skippered by the late Gordon Reynolds, returned with team yachts Mercedes II and Balandra and won the Admiral’s Cup.

Since that audacious first challenge from the ‘colonials with their out-of-date designs’, as some members of the British yachting elite commented in the lead-up to the 1965 Cup, Australia has taken part in the international offshore teams series 17 times. We have notched up three wins, finished second four times and third twice.

As the Admiral’s Cup grew in status, in the 1970s it attracted three boat teams from as many as 19 nations and Cowes on the Isle of Wight across The Solent from Southampton on the south coast of England became the mecca for the world’s best yachts and yachtsmen, along with leading naval architects, boat-builders and sail-makers. The boats they created brought new innovations to yachting.

Famous yachtsmen such as British Prime Minister Edward Heath, America’s Cup challenger Alan Bond, America’s Cup skippers John Bertrand and Dennis Connor were competitors in the 1970s and 1980s. Australia’s teams included our most successful ocean racing skippers, among them Trygve and Magnus Halvorsen, Syd Fischer, Sir Robert Crichton-Brown, Denis O’Neil, Peter Kurts, Lou Abrahams and Gary Appleby, all Sydney Hobart winners at some stage in their careers.

Syd Fischer skippered his boats called Ragamuffin six Admiral’s Cup challenges including Australia’s second win in 1979 where the great victory of Ragamuffin, Peter Cantwell’s Police Car and Graeme Lambert and John Crisp’s Impetuous was overshadowed by the tragic loss of many yachtsmen in a violent storm in the Irish Sea.

International team challenges began to diminish in the 1990s, with Australia’s best effort in that decade being a second in 1993 when the team of Ninja, Great News II and Ragamuffin lost to Germany by less than one point.

The Admiral’s Cup was not staged in 2001 because of lack of teams, but was revived by the Royal Ocean Racing Club in 2003 with club, rather than national teams of two boats, instead of three. A team from Australia’s Royal Prince Alfred Yacht Club, Bob Oatley’s canting keel Wild Oats, helmed by Mark Richards, and Colin O’Neill’s Aftershock, helmed by Colin Beashel, won in a last-race thriller. This was theay forerunner of Oatley and Richards’ string of successes in the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race.

The Admiral’s Cup has not been held since then, but the RORC has mooted plans to revive the international offshore yachting contest in 2011. In the meantime, the great Cup contests of past years will be remembered long into the evening of 18 November 2010 at the CYCA. Gordon Ingate and Mark Richards may even compare notes and designs, after all Caprice of Huon and Wild Oats are still racing competitively.

‘Old salts’ who sauntered down the High Street at Cowes back in those iconic days and battled the foul tides and sucking sandbanks of The Solent in the short inshore races before heading west to Fastnet Rock should contact Peter Hemery on 0418 289 453 or email him on pjph@bigpond.com or Peter Shipway on 0418 865 157 or email him on Barlow@hotkey.net.au

Peter Campbell covered seven Admiral’s Cup in the halcyon days of this great event at Cowes, England.