New Zealand: 18 footer innovators

by Frank Quealey 22 Jul 23:34 PDT

David McDiarmid's Honda Marine 18 footer team had just completed its three-in-a-row winning run at the 2020 JJ Giltinan World Championship on Sydney Harbour when the Covid pandemic hit and suspended the New Zealand 18ft skiff challenge until 2024.

Picking up the pieces after a four-year lay off from the highly competitive class was going to be a major project but, with the expertise, enthusiasm and hard work of Graham Catley, Suellen Hurling and class stalwart Alex Vallings, the kiwi campaign has been put back on track as New Zealand prepares for another top class campaign in 2026.

The strong kiwi return in 2024 and 2025 reminds us about the success of the New Zealand innovators, designers and competitors, who achieved so much since the original 1938 JJ Giltinan regatta and on two occasions changed the style of 18 footer racing in Australia.

When James Giltinan invited yachting areas around the world to compete in the first regatta for the World 18 footer championship on Sydney Harbour in 1938, due to the unrest in the unrest in the northern hemisphere at the time, only New Zealand accepted the invitation and sent four boats to race against seventeen Australian 18s.

New Zealand only had two classes of 18 footers racing at the time; the V-class and the M-class, and practically the only thing the Australian 18 footers and the New Zealanders had in common was the length of the hull. Despite the difference, the regatta was a huge success, which The Sydney Morning Herald described on the day after the first race, "The grip that 18 footer sailing has on the Sydney community was clearly demonstrated yesterday when a record crowd watched Taree win the first heat of the world championship on the harbour."

NSW skipper Bert Swinbourne, in Taree, easily won the championship but Australian administrators were so impressed by the challenge that, when they received an invitation from New Zealand to compete in an event at Auckland in 1939, Australia sent a three-boat team to contest the regatta against more than 20 M-class and V-class boats.

It appeared that Swinbourne had successfully defended the title but a later protest disqualified Taree and awarded the title to New Zealand's Gordon Chamberlin and Manu, which led to a long-running dispute when Swinbourne rejected the decision and refused to hand over the trophy until 1946.

Although the result was controversial, the regatta was a huge success as spectators along the foreshore were estimated at 25,000 people. The win by Manu created a great 18ft Skiff Racing tradition of innovators who were prepared to experiment in their quest for victory and have been wonderful contributors to the evolution of the 18s, particularly between the 1950s and 1970s.

Jack Logan started the influence at the 1950 World Championship when he believed that he wouldn't beat the Australians in the boat he sailed at the 1948 championship. He decided to browse through some old plans of his late father, who was a master designer and boat builder, and came across a design on a piece of 50-year-old parchment paper that gave him an idea for a new skiff.

Logan drew out the round bilge design, chopped off the bow and gave her a transom in place of a pointed stem. He rigged her with the latest Bermudan rig, polished her hull to a mirror-finish, and christened her Komutu, the Maori word for surprise. The public called her a 'skimmer'.

At the 1950 championship in Auckland, the Australian teams were unable to match the phenomenal speed of this unusual boat and were convincingly defeated, by margins ranging from 6mins-14mins, in the three-race regatta.

Australia's Bill Barnett reversed the result in Sydney in 1951 before the 1952 regatta was allocated to Suva Fiji for the one-and-only time.

Laurie Davidson designed the first moulded veneer 18 footer, Daniel Boone, which was built by Dave Marks specifically for the light conditions expected in Fiji. The boat was said to be "light years ahead of anything else at the time" but unfortunately was finished too late to contest the full selection trials and missed the 1952 worlds.

In the meantime, another newcomer came to the fore when Canterbury's talented Peter Mander arrived at Auckland with a radical cold moulded cedar planked round bilge "flier", named Intrigue, which had been built by him and his crew. It had a much more buoyant hull shape than the Australian 18s and weighed around 250 lbs, compared to the 400 lbs Australian 18s

Intrigue was extremely fast, but fragile, so Mander and his crew returned to Canterbury with a long list of changes prior to going to Suva, Fiji.

By the time Intrigue arrived in Fiji, she had a new rotating mast, a much enlarged sail plan and a new set of sails made by Mander. She also had trapeze wires and a host of other modifications. Intrigue introduced the idea of having two of her five-man crew on trapeze wires which was claimed at the time "enabled one man to virtually have the leverage of two."

Going into the final race, Intrigue held the championship lead over Tarua and Jenny IV which created so much interest in the outcome that the race was broadcast on shortwave by Fijian Radio ZJV and re-broadcast by all New Zealand national radio stations. Intrigue recorded a narrow victory for the strong team.

After the championship, it was agreed to race the World Championship every two years and the next contest was scheduled for Auckland in early 1954. The regatta was yet another triumph for New Zealand as it attracted fourteen boats, representing Auckland, Canterbury, NSW, Queensland and Fiji, in a variety of designs.

The Australian team were planked skiffs, built as lightly as technology allowed, some gaff, some marconi-rigged, and pushing the boundaries of accepted skiff design. Both New Zealand and Fiji featured the latest examples of their planked skimmers, but the New Zealand team also included new super-lightweight moulded veneer hulls, featuring innovation and technology ideas taken from the aerospace industry.

The two-man trapeze system used at Suva in 1952 had been refined by the New Zealanders and now their boats had two or three permanent trapeze men. Defending champion, Intrigue had three on trapeze with a fourth man lying, unsupported, out on top of a trapeze man.

Another new boat, named Envy, was built by Dave Marks, who strengthened the hull around the mast area, put a bowsprit on her and greatly enlarged the rig. Envy was "a revelation upwind and a flier downwind", but gear failure was a problem which greatly affected her consistency.

Intrigue successfully defended her title after the first two races of the three-race regatta, which was fortunate as the hull had split around the chain plates and the deck had been raised in several places by the hull compression.

New Zealand's domination was complete, Envy won the final race of the regatta and finished as runner-up, with another New Zealander Tekana in third place. The Kiwi designers and sailors had become great innovators in the class during the early 1950s and it wasn't surprising that their ideas immediately changed the style of 18 footer in Australia.

Bern Skinner's Surprise won the 1960 regatta at Auckland but the emergence of the Queensland-designed Taipan overshadowed the victory and took the evolution in a totally different direction as the hull design went into the three-handed stage.

It was another decade before the next great New Zealand design came to the top of the class.

After good performances in 1971, the predicted Bruce Farr design breakthrough finally arrived in 1972 when Don Lidgard's Smirnoff totally dominated the World Championship on Waterloo Bay, Brisbane after scoring easy wins in each of the first four races.

The Smirnoff victory (the first by a three-handed skiff) was also the first of four consecutive wins for the design: Bob Holmes won in 1973 with Travelodge NSW, Terry McDell in 1974 with Travelodge New Zealand and David Porter with KB in 1975.

According to David Porter, "Farr boats had three complete rigs, with full dimension detailed drawing of every aspect of the boat, and designed around the total weight of the crew. For a light weight crew the hull and sail plan were smaller than that for a heavier crew. The hulls were hard chine, constructed from light plywood and covered with a layer of Kevlar cloth. They were strong and very stiff."

"All Farr designs had extended deck wings, some had gybing centreboards, others had small skegs built into the keel aft to increase the water flow around the rudder surface and reduce cavitation under load."

Roger Welsh's USA team was so impressed with Farr's design that he was commissioned to design, and build, a new hull and make a complete set of sails in New Zealand, for a new skiff, which on completion, was shipped to the US, gained sponsorship from the Travelodge Hotel organization, then taken to Sydney where Welsh skippered her as Travelodge International in the 1973 worlds.

Only two years later, New Zealand's Russell Bowler had progressed his design ideas of the previous three or four seasons and introduced his latest design on Benson & Hedges at the 1977 worlds. His boat was a very small, light, round-bilged hull which pioneered a polystyrene core sandwiched by a very thin fiberglass laminate, with a structural frame, and was reportedly one-third lighter than the plywood NZ boats. Bowler's new structure proved stiff and fast and it wasn't surprising when Australian skippers adopted a similar method for the following season to replace the lightweight moulded-plywood construction.

A rapid increase in costs associated with the building and longevity of a competitive hull throughout the 1980s took a heavy toll on the New Zealand 18 footer scene and it was another 40 years before we saw another kiwi victory in the 18s.

The class had settled on a one design hull during the early 1990s so this time is was individuals like Graham Catley, who put together a financial program to bring the New Zealand challenge back to the top, and Alex Vallings, who was instrumental in the rig development, who were the principal players in the progression which resulted in the three consecutive victories by the Honda Marine team (2018, 2019, 2020) of David McDiarmid, Matt Steven and Brad Collins.

Only the Covid pandemic could stop the most successful New Zealand team in the history of the Giltinan World championship, but with such a wonderful record of innovation and achievement in the class, you can only predict that it won't be the last great victory for the kiwi 18 footer sailors and innovators.