Learn to Sail Report

Laurie Davidson had a fascination for the America’s Cup and, long before he became involved, studied the 12-Metre Rule. Here he poses with a half model he built of Herreshoff’s 1905 defender, Reliance. – Ivor Wilkins photo.

Take a Bow: Laurie Davidson’s design journey from ferro-cement to carbon-fibre Cup winners

By Ivor Wilkins Work as an accountant with a sideline in ferro-cement boats would seem an unlikely platform for yacht design stardom, yet that was how Laurie Davidson began an extraordinary international professional design career that included crushing victories in back-to-back America’s Cup regattas, first as a challenger and then as defender.

Davidson, who died in early October aged 94, played lead roles in the design teams behind NZL32, which won the 1995 America’s Cup match by 5-0, and in NZL60, which did the same in the 2000 Cup defence against Luna Rossa.

He was always amused by his more lowly design origins. Of course, Davidson did not make the leap from ferro-cement utility to carbon fibre star wars in a single bound. In between, he demonstrated his versatility and skill in a wide range of projects, from dinghies to Ton Cup yachts, round-the-world racers, handsome cruisers and grand prix campaigners.

Before entering the ranks of professional yacht design, Davidson demonstrated a keen talent for unpicking a rule and coming up with a new and faster interpretation. In 1948, he caused an uproar in Auckland’s highly competitive M-Class fleet with a new design called Myth.

With its straight stem, acutely angled forefoot and lightweight construction, Myth proved very quick. Under grave threat from this precocious newcomer, the class hit back. Some of the more vehement opponents even suggested purchasing Myth and burning it – like a witch at the stake.

Instead, Myth survived and, following a rebuild to remedy a breach of class rules, a rush of new Davidson boats followed. It took more than 30 years before a non-Davidson boat won the M-Class championship again.

The Myth story not only underlined Davidson’s design talent, but also his considerable sailing prowess. The Myth legend was so strong, some thought it would flourish in anybody’s hands, but when Davidson finally sold the boat, its star never shone as brightly again.

He also competed at a high level in the Flying Dutchman class and was going well in the Olympic trials for the 1964 Tokyo Games when a north easterly squall capsized most of the fleet. Davidson’s boat was damaged and could not complete the trials, which were won by Helmer Pedersen and Earle Wells, who went on to win gold. By strange coincidence, Wells died within a week of Davidson’s death.

For most of the 1960s, Davidson worked as an accountant for Certified Concrete Ltd. When the company wanted to capitalise on the trend towards ferro-concrete boats, they looked to Davidson for the design.

During a research visit to the US, Davidson visited Olin Stephens. An early devotee of computers, Stephens was using an Olivetti system with Fortran punch cards for his calculations. By coincidence, Certified Concrete used the same system, so Davidson purchased Stephens’ design package.

Later, when he left Certified Concrete to set up his own professional yacht design studio, Davidson purchased one of the Olivetti machines for his own use. This early adoption of computer technology belies a popular image of Davidson as a Luddite – an image he did nothing to discourage.

During his time at Team New Zealand (1995 to 2000), he took pride in a cartoon which portrayed him sitting on top of a desktop computer while he pencilled lines by hand on a traditional drawing board. The caption read ‘Computer Aided Design’.

But, both Brett Bakewell-White and Kevin Dibley, who worked closely with Davidson for nine and 30 years respectively, testified he fully understood the value of computer assistance, but preferred getting

others to run the software and generate construction drawings.

“I never met somebody as passionate about boats as Laurie,” said Bakewell-White, who first worked with Davidson during the 1987 New Zealand Challenge America’s Cup campaign.

“Completely self-taught, his bible was a 1938 edition of Skene’s Elements of Yacht Design. The key to his designs was Skene’s curve of areas and the wave form theory as proposed by Colin Archer in 1877, which is basically about the distribution of volume in a hull and the flow of water past it. He never wavered from it.

“Aesthetics were also important to him. He was a classicist in many ways, following established ideas of sheerlines and proportion. He studied the work of people like Herreshoff and Watson. Laurie’s boats had a subtlety and delicacy about them that set them apart.”

Kevin Dibley formed a working partnership with Davidson in 1992 which remained in place for the remainder of his working life and will continue with the handling of Davidson’s portfolio moving forward. He described Davidson as highly intuitive. “He could see the boat in three dimensions in his mind’s eye long before it went down on paper. He could visualise how water would flow across the hull.”

Following his ferro-cement period, Davidson’s first commission as a professional yacht designer was a Half-Tonner, Blitzkrieg, for Tony Bouzaid, brother of Chris Bouzaid. Blitzkrieg won the 1971 New Zealand Half Ton championship with Davidson on board.

Seven years later, when New Zealand was captivated by very lightlybuilt centreboard IOR boats much to the horror of northern hemisphere measurers, Bouzaid returned to Davidson for a second Half-Tonner.

This was Waverider, which won the Half Ton Cup in Poole in 1978. Then, following modifications to comply with changes in the rule, Waverider defended its title the following year in Germany, an unprecedented achievement at the time.

During the IOR heyday, Californian John MacLaurin became an important client, building five Davidson-designed boats, all called Pendragon. The first was designed as a Three Quarter-Tonner, which won the 1978 Three-Quarter Ton Cup in Canada.

When subsequent changes to the rule rendered the purple yacht out of contention as a Three-Quarter Tonner, Davidson drew up significant modification to allow Pendragon to rate as a small One Tonner. Sure enough, Pendragon duly won the 1979 One Ton Cup in light air at Newport Rhode Island, the only yacht ever to win two different Ton Cup classes.

The fourth Pendragon, a 52-footer launched in 1998, inspired the TP52 class. As Californian designer Bill Lee recalled, during broad-ranging discussions about the ideal characteristics for a new grand prix class, the breakthrough came when someone said: “Hey you guys, this is already done. Look at Pendragon IV and just draw a box around it!”

Arguably, however, Davidson’s proudest legacy lay with the America’s Cup. When New Zealand made its Cup debut in 1987 with a bold leap into the world’s first fibre-glass 12-Metres, the design team comprised Davidson, Bruce Farr and Ron Holland.

“Laurie had a fascination for the America’s Cup,” recalled BakewellWhite. “He was a student of its history and, purely as an intellectual exercise, he had been drawing 12-Metre yachts for years. When the New Zealand Challenge got off the ground, he was probably the only one of the three designers who had studied the rule and drawn designs.”

New Zealand’s big breakthrough came in 1995, when Davidson and Doug Peterson were the principal designers in a talented group led by Tom Schnackenberg.

Working to the International America’s Cup Class (IACC) rule which replaced 12-Metres in 1992, the Team New Zealand consensus was to go long and narrow. Of its two new yachts, NZL32 was slightly narrower and longer than NZL38. Both were great performers: NZL38 won the Louis Vuitton Cup with only a single loss in the entire series; then NZL32 stepped up to beat Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes by 5-0 to bring the elusive trophy to New Zealand shores.

For the 2000 Defence, Schnackenberg was again design co-ordinator in a large group with Davidson and Clay Oliver billed as the principal designers. Quite early in the design process, the designers chopped the bow off NZL38 about 600mm behind the forward girth station and created a pram bow, like an Optimist dinghy.

“We went out on the water and it seemed to go just the same as before,” recalled Schnackenberg. “We thought, ‘Here we go!’ This boat, under the rules, was now 2ft shorter. We could take the entire boat and stretch it 2ft and it would be back to the same rating as before.”

Sniffing worthwhile prey, the design hounds were off and running. There were promising results with an almost plumb IOR type bow, while other investigations pursued a more classic Metre bow shape.

“Clay Oliver did some work on it and Andy Claughton was involved, but Laurie went off on his own and came up with a couple of drawings.” Davidson’s concept featured a quite pronounced waterline chin at the forward girth station, but instead of rising steeply into an IOR bow, it took a shallower incline, more like a Metre bow. It was essentially a hybrid of the two styles.

Russell Coutts recalled being surprised by how full the bow sections were, while Clay Oliver admired Davidson’s much-vaunted design eye, which spied the “goldilocks zone” between the IOR and Metre shapes.

“It really didn’t look like much until we took it to the towing tank,” said Schnackenberg. “Suddenly at the same fixed speed, the drag was a lot less. I was actually a little surprised and excited at how well it worked.

“By stretching the bow and stern waves further apart, that little chin tricked the water that the hull was longer than it actually was. When we tested it further, we found it was effective in light air and heavier air and also in waves. It had no weaknesses. It is a tribute to Laurie that he came up with it.”

What became known as the Davidson Bow featured on both NZL57 and NZL60. As the Match drew near, there was a feeling in the defence group that they may have pushed length slightly too hard, so they pared NZL60 back in exchange for more sail area.

“We just lifted the bow slope slightly, shortening the rule length by about 2-3 inches,” said Schnackenberg. “It demonstrated that the bow was really quite adaptable. You could tune it to the expected conditions. If we were expecting heavier air, we could probably have gone the other way as well.”

In the hands of a formidable sailing team, NZL60’s subsequent 5-0 victory delivered the first successful defence of the America’s Cup outside of the USA and was testimony to a highly refined all-round design package.

There was considerable praise for the millennium rig, for example, and the attention paid to aerodynamics. But the Davidson Bow will forever enjoy star billing in the NZL60 story. “I would say the bow was the key difference between the two boats,” Schnackenberg declared.

Learn-to-Sail Report

Learn to Sail partners with Whiting Sailing

By Billy Woodworth One of New Zealand’s oldest sailing schools has partnered with RNZYS’s Learn to Sail Training to share resources and coaching expertise.

Whiting Sailing, owned by Carl ‘Tiny’ Whiting, an America’s Cup winner, Star Class World Champion, Olympian and Youth Training Programme graduate will bring his years of high-profile sailing and coaching experience to join forces with the current RNZYS ‘Learn To Sail’ coaching team, led by Training Manager, Peter Linford.

This partnership benefits both training schools and their sailing students, allowing access to a larger range of shared resources including the RNZYS’s existing fleet of Elliott 7’s, Sonar’s Etchell and Farr MRX’s alongside Carl’s yacht Emotional Rescue, a Davidson 55 yacht. Emotional Rescue was the first monohull to win the PIC Coastal Classic in 1989.

This 55 footer allows the RNZYS to expand its ability to run Level 2 and Level 3 cruising courses to Kawau Island and Great Barrier Island respectively, while continuing Whiting Sailing’s Keelboat Racing Development programme. Both organisations will actively create a sailing pathway and coaching opportunities for all level sailors – from competitive racing to cruising and the beginner sailors that continue to be the foundation that New Zealand’s rich sailing history builds upon.

Peter Linford learned to sail on his arrival in New Zealand in 2007 with Mt Pleasant Yacht Club in Christchurch, and reckons that he has been on the water every weekend since. He has 10 years of sailing coaching experience, with four of those as the Learn To Sail Manager with the RNZYS. Peter fell in love with sailing at night, “so my favourite sailing memory is when I came across dolphins playing in bioluminescent bacteria – that was absolutely magical.”

“The success of the RNZYS training school over the last four years has meant we needed to bring in more coaches and more resources as we grow, and by partnering with Whiting Sailing allows us to expand into race coaching to hone the skills of those already racing, and

as a pathway for those interested in starting.”

Alongside the additional resources made available to the RNZYS training school, Peter is also looking forward to working with Whiting Sailing so he can sail for his first time on the Emotional Rescue.

Carl Whiting shares these sentiments, saying the partnership between the RNZYS and Whiting Sailing means that “new prospective sailors have the ultimate opportunity to get into the sport of yachting being part of one of the greatest clubs in the world, to learning from some of the best sailors in the world, not to mention the opportunity to learn and sail aboard an incredible and legendary boat like Emotional Rescue.” Carl’s favourite sailing memories are trips away sailing with his family at Christmas in the Bay of Islands. “My family have been teaching sailing for over 50 years and l have been taking part my whole life -I actively started coaching myself 20 years ago.”

For Whiting, the most rewarding part of coaching is “simply experiencing the joy that comes from the students once they have established the confidence to sail a boat.” Even with the years of expertise that Carl, Peter and the other Learn to Sail Coaches, sailing isn’t something that can be instantly picked up. Carl believes that helping any student establish the confidence that they need, in order to learn a new skill is the most crucial aspect in teaching someone to sail.

Peter shares the same sentiment that, the key to being a yachting coach is to have empathy with the beginner sailors. By“being patient and simplifying down the many tasks it takes to sail a yacht, the Learn to Sail course builds a platform that allows us to expand on our student’s knowledge and target what to work on.”

Peter has seen the benefits that sailing can bring someone first-hand, recalling the time he was coaching a group that had a child with learning difficulties taking part, and he really struggled at the start and couldn’t seem to work out the tiller steering. However, Peter pulled them aside and gave some tips with the steering and where to be positioned while racing, and at their next session they were out in front of the other boats with a beaming smile – “I’ll never forget that.”

Both men see sailing as much more than just being on the water, and have gained far more understanding about what sailing teaches people within off the water from a coaching point of view. Once a student becomes more confident with sailing, they gain self-belief in everyday life. “Fixing an issue on a yacht is just like any other issue – once you have the tools and someone has taught you methods to fix the issue, following through and fixing the issue feeds your self-reliance and self-belief,” says Peter. Carl sees the same benefits in sailing, with the key lessons being “learning fundamental skills, building confidence and enjoying yourself; not only will learning to sail give you something new to learn and enjoy it will also improve all the other aspects of your life”.

However as society and technology changes, more opportunities present themselves for people to create a career from sailing. Peter mentions that “three of my students are currently running sailing YouTube channels; it’s a unique and new pathway for sailors to use the skills we teach them to create a career from their sailing passion.”

LIKE SAILING -‘SAFETY FIRST’

Argus is large enough to cope, but small enough to care.

We offer a wide range of quality, world leading products and systems New Zealand wide, and can offer a full range of services for the commercial and industrial sectors including:

• Design and installation • Regular testing and certification • Ongoing and preventative maintenance