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WARREN MUIR INTERVIEW
Warren Muir on boats and design Many former sailors and champions turned up in Newport during the 2020 Gold Cup and Worlds to look at the boats and meet old friends. One of those was Warren Muir, former sailor, and leading designer in the class during the 1980s.
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arren Muir grew up sailing, racing and messing about in boats on the waters of Sydney Harbour. He has sailed since he was 11 years old, “Just about anything that would float, had a sail number and got a start gun. I don’t remember hardly ever missing a sailing race weekend. I started sailing 5.5 Metres with Nemesis at the Sydney Amateur Sailing club on Sydney Harbour back in 1975 and finished sailing with Roy Tutty on KA 35, Rhapsody, at the 1986 Worlds at RPAYC on Pittwater in 1986. I sailed almost every Saturday and most mid-week afternoon races. The best memories are from the worlds in The Bahamas in 1981 and Norway in 1984, great regattas, well-managed, good breeze and fun courses and meeting friends I will have forever. I really miss the 5.5 Metre camaraderie.” After graduating from high school he started work at a local boatyard training as a boat builder and completed a four-year apprenticeship. The first two years of his apprenticeship were spent with Jeff Clist Boatbuilding in Annandale, (Sydney), which mainly specialised in sailing yachts, dinghies and spars. Clist’s also built the Bill Luders designed 5.5 metre KA14 Barranjoey, which won Australia’s first sailing Olympic gold medal, in Enoshima in 1964, skippered by Sir William Northam. “KA 14, Barranjoey, was the first 5.5 Metre that I had really seen up close besides the ones sailing on Sydney harbour while I was racing my VJ class dinghy. It was built at
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Jeff Clist Boatbuilding on Roselle bay in Annandale Sydney where I was a first year apprentice boatbuilder. I got to help the tradesmen with all their work, sweep up all the shavings and crawl into the bow to varnish the interior as I was the smallest at that time and glue in all the wooden screw head plugs on the outside, carefully making sure all the wood grain lined up. I then worked on the hull each day up at RPAYC sanding the bottom paint smooth when she was preparing for the races to determine the Australian Olympic representative for Tokyo in 1964.” The second two years of his apprenticeship were spent at Lewis Brothers Boatbuilding at Taren Point, just south of Sydney, which specialised in water skiing and high speed circuit racing boats. He credits his lifelong desire to design and build better, faster boats to collective knowledge of the various owners and people he worked with in the two boatyards. He says the attraction to being a boat designer boats was a natural progression from being a boat builder. “I was always tweaking the performance of my dinghies, yachts and boats I was sailing on.” Before his relocation to the USA he designed and built many more boats including numerous sailing dinghies that have won state and national titles in Australia, and raced on some of Australia’s great ocean racers. 5.5 Metre Design He was attracted to the 5.5 Metre because, “It was a boat I could design and build myself, giving me great satisfaction on both sides, and not being able to afford the money to race with the plastic Etchells class that was building up in numbers
