All Piss and Wind (15 page)

G
REAT YACHT DESIGNERS
– ‘naval architects' to give them their proper moniker – are part-engineer, part-gambler and part-artist. They conjure from their imaginations and knowledge a complex three-dimensional object that has to sail well and hold together. Despite more than a century of intensive research into hydrodynamics and airflow, not all their ideas succeed. There are no breakthroughs without risk. But a common mark of the best designers is that all their creations are distinctive. Buried somewhere in the lines is the subtle signature of the mind that conceived the boat. For those with a love of yachts, it doesn't take more than a quick glance to recognise the work of Fife, Herreshoff, Mylne, Alden, Perry, Frers, Reimers, Payne, Stephens, DuBois, Petersen, Holland, Dovell, Pugh and the handful of new designers who now dominate the industry.

Yet there was one naval architect whose output defies this rule. Each of his yachts was a new idea. He had such a restless and experimental mind that they were either world-beaters or irredeemable dogs. But his place in sailing history is cemented forever as the designer of the boat that won the America's Cup from the Yanks after 132 years: Ben Lexcen, previously Bob Miller (and therefore
‘Ben-Bob' to his mates). He was infuriated by the constraints of tradition, notoriously impatient and had an infectious passion for the unconventional. The formalities of yachting annoyed him. Had he lived to be asked to the 150th anniversary ceremonies for the America's Cup at Cowes there's a good chance Ben-Bob would have chucked his official invitation in the rubbish bin – or sent his beloved old dog along instead.

It was precisely this forthright larrikin spirit that made Lexcen/Miller such an unforgettable character for those of us lucky enough to have spent some time with him. Almost twenty years after his death I still find it difficult to pass a day on the water without something reminding me of Ben-Bob and the extraordinary contributions he made to Australian sailing. He hated rules of any kind and delighted in using his intuitive engineering intelligence to subvert and then defeat the established order. Those qualities attracted me to him even as a teenager. I remember poring over reports in
Seacraft
magazine of a brash young Queensland skipper who'd exploded onto the hidebound world of 18-foot skiffs in the early 1960s. In successive Australian and ‘World' championships Miller blew away the conventional 18-footer fleets sailing a pair of radical hard-chine flyers he'd designed and built himself (and given the typically aggressive names of
Taipan
and
Venom
).

Norm Wright, the legendary Queensland yachtsman and boat-builder who'd taken on the young Bob Miller as an apprentice sailmaker, remembered having to help lift one of Bob's skiffs halfway into the Brisbane River because Bob had fitted an experimental endplate to the bottom of his centreboard. Thirty years later a variant of that innovation hung from
Australia II
's keel when she won the America's Cup. Bob gleefully overturned all the conventional wisdom of skiff design (big bowsprits, long booms, large beam, heavy crews) to redefine the 18-foot ethos. He created narrow, lightweight machines built for speed – and nothing else. The underlying basis of that early success was Bob's trust in his own
restless instinct for lateral design thinking – and it became the Miller hallmark.

Bob soon moved to Sydney and formed a business and sailing partnership with Flying Dutchman champion Craig Whitworth. He began fooling about with hot-moulded sails but his heart by then was more on the design board. The breakthroughs came quickly. With owner Ted Kaufman he created the radical 40-footer
Mercedes III
, an Admiral's Cup standout that won nine of her first fourteen races. In 1968 Miller's low-freeboard 16-foot trapeze rocket
Contender
topped an international design competition for a new single-handed centreboarder. The morning after that win was announced I convinced the ABC program
This Day Tonight
to send me out to Bob's home in northern Sydney to film a report on the winning designer and his boat. A battered prototype was leaning up against the back fence. The chances of sailing the boat seemed remote but we managed to round up an old trailer and enough gear to get her rigged. By the time we'd arrived at Clontarf beach the breeze was howling across Middle Harbour at a fearsome 30 knots.

‘Too much puff? Want to call it off?' I asked.

‘Nah, she'll be right,' smiled Bob through his trademark rapid blink, pulling on a couple of extra pullovers. It was a wet ride at the end of the
Contender
's trapeze, and he clearly expected an early dunking or two.

For the next hour the film crew was treated to a thrilling display of power sailing. Miller cranked his design up onto a succession of spectacular, screaming reaches while spray flew and the camera whirred. But on the last gybe the mainsheet jammed and pitched
Contender
into a nasty capsize. Any other sailor would have slowly brought the boat head-to-wind, righted it and then carefully sorted out the snarl. Not Bob. He just leapt onto the fin, scrambled aboard and immediately began kicking the tripe out of the jammed snatch-block that had caused the pickle. Within seconds the sheet untwisted and Miller was back out on the trapeze, roaring off on
another reach as if to teach the recalcitrant boat a lesson. It was a telling insight into Bob's whole approach to sailing. He always seemed to have an acute natural feel for the forces at work, and never hesitated to test them to the limit.

A year after the
Contender
triumph, a millionaire Sydney cleaning contractor wanted to challenge the world 24-hour distance record under sail. Miller designed him a 35-foot plywood trimaran meant to rise on its hydro-foils from 15 knots of true wind. On the launch day we all sat around glumly as not a single breath of wind ruffled the water. Bob could contain his frustration no longer. He just
had
to know if his design worked. ‘Bugger it. We'll tow the bloody thing!'

Within minutes he'd commandeered a large speedboat with twin outboards and was dragging his creation up and down Blackwattle Bay at increasing speeds, watching intently as the foils struggled to yield any lift. On the third run there was that terrible, telltale groan of fittings under extreme load and then a mighty
bang!
as the rudder sheared off. ‘Well, at least we know we've gotta strengthen
that
.' Bob always preferred the proof of practical testing to theoretical calculations back in the design studio. In fact, he believed that if things didn't break on a boat they were most probably over-engineered. His lifelong campaign against unnecessary displacement was summed up in a favourite saying: ‘The only place weight's any good is in a bloody steam-roller!'

A decade after the trimaran disaster Bob Miller had become Ben Lexcen. Considerable sailing folklore has accumulated around the mystery of why he changed his name. The truth of the matter provides an instructive insight into an uncomfortable intersection between the forces of individual genius and the profit motive. The successful sailmaking, chandlery and design business Miller had built up with Craig Whitworth was a limited company. As such, it legally ‘stood separate to its owners'. While the restless Bob was away designing and campaigning yachts, Whitworth – quite legally – gradually bought Miller out of the company, but continued to
trade under the well-established ‘Miller & Whitworth' name. After the disappointing
Southern Cross
challenge for the America's Cup in 1974, Bob went for a year without a design commission. But owners were still getting new boats drawn with the prestigious ‘Miller & Whitworth' name on the plans. Those designs had, as I understand it, been done by lesser-known designers.

Bob was so angered when he discovered this that he consulted a lawyer. ‘What can I do about it?' asked the distressed designer.

‘Nothing,' said the lawyer, ‘it's entirely legal.'

Bob, who always believed that concerted action and applied intelligence could solve any problem, was seething. ‘But there must be
something
I can do!'

‘Well,' said the lawyer, half-joking, ‘you could always change your name.'

And that's exactly what he did. To find a surname, Bob set his computer the task of running endless random permutations until he found one that looked unique. How about ‘Lexcen'? There weren't any Lexcens listed in the phone book. That'll do. As for a new first name, he just called himself after the family dog, Ben. The formalities were processed by deed poll in 1977. Problem solved, and under that new name his designing career soon regathered momentum until its glorious climax in the 1983 America's Cup.

The story of
Australia II
's wonderful come-from-behind win at Newport has been told many times and need not detain us here. My own view is that the Bond syndicate's intensive sail development program – especially Hugh Treharne's work on light-weather spinnakers – may have contributed at least as much to that victory as the legendary winged keel. But the keel grabbed all the headlines and certainly gave the Australians a tremendous propaganda advantage.

What's easy to forget among all the historical hype is that
Australia II
was an outstanding 12-metre design. Ben, in private,
was no great fan of the metre rule, calling the boats it yielded ‘old-fashioned lead mines'. His mind was far more stimulated by the excitement of experimentation and radical design ideas. Even the America's Cup competition was beginning to bore him and he was irritated by the mythology of the whole event. Before the final races in 1983 he said that if Australia managed to win, he'd take the Cup itself to West 44th Street (the home of the New York Yacht Club), hire a steam-roller and run over the venerable trophy until he'd turned it into ‘The America's Plate'. At the presentation ceremony on the balcony of the old Vanderbilt mansion in Newport after
Australia II
's win, NYYC Commodore Robert Stone Jr presented Ben with a battered Plymouth hubcap in humorous acknowledgement of that characteristically provocative remark.

Australia II
made Ben world-famous, but he never lost his cheery, knockabout way of deflating the mumbo-jumbo of modern naval architecture. In 1984 he accepted my invitation to provide expert commentary for Channel Seven's coverage of the start of the Sydney–Hobart race. I was crewing on
Apollo
, a powerful 83-foot aluminium maxi he'd co-designed for Jack Rooklyn. By the magic of what was then cutting-edge technology we could send ‘live' pictures from the deck and inject my own comments as we thundered down the harbour alongside
Nirvana
and
Condor
, just managing to hold on to a giant shy kite. Spinnaker starts in the Hobart are always spectacular, but this one was truly dramatic.

‘Tell me, Ben,' interposed the anchorman, ‘how much force would there be in that spinnaker? About how many pounds?'

After a long pause, Lexcen just said, ‘Oh, a fair bit. Hard to say, really.'

From the leeward coffee-grinder on
Apollo
I chipped in with, ‘Come on, Ben, you designed the boat. You should know the numbers if anyone does.'

Another long pause. Then that familiar Queensland drawl: ‘Well, mate, in this breeze I reckon the pull would be equivalent
to about two Mack trucks going flat chat.'

In a single laconic quip he'd given the audience a vivid impression of just how much grunt was in that monstrous spinnaker. Four hours later, close-hauled off Port Kembla, I was still chuckling at his remark.

The last time I saw Ben was at a Sydney nightclub for the somewhat bizarre product launch of a winged skateboard he'd designed (because, he claimed, he was sick of falling off the conventional variety). There'd already been hints of cardiac problems during the 1983 campaign in Newport and he seemed short of breath and uncomfortable amid the showbiz glitz of such a blatantly commercial event. Ben's spirits only picked up as he explained his new-found enthusiasm for computers and the way they were beginning to take much of the arithmetic drudgery out of designing yachts. We managed a brief chat above the noise of the disco music and went our separate ways. Lexcen's heart suddenly gave out a few days later.

With an ounce more luck, Ben might still be with us today. When his wife Yvonne rang for the ambulance after the heart attack she told them that the driveway to their house in Seaforth was very steep and that they'd have trouble getting out unless they backed the vehicle down. Regrettably, the paramedics didn't take her advice and there was a considerable delay before the ambulance could make it back up to the main road. The closest hospital, Manly, decided Ben was in pretty poor shape and would stand a better chance at the much larger Royal North Shore Hospital, six kilometres away at St Leonards. Then, just as the ambulance came to the bottom of the hill to cross Middle Harbour, the Spit Bridge was raised for one of its scheduled openings to let sailing boats pass through. That 10-minute delay was crucial. By the time the ambulance arrived at Royal North Shore, Ben was dead.

It's doubtful whether the Miller/Lexcen name will ever be admitted to the popular pantheon of great naval architects. He
never designed for the eye. Ben-Bob was only interested in drawing a graceful line if it was also fast. His total output was small because of a short working life, and because so much of that time was consumed by the four 12-metre campaigns he waged with Alan Bond. Nevertheless, boats such as
Rampage
,
Ceil III
,
Mercedes III
,
Ginkgo
,
Plum Crazy
and the 12-metres were all genuine breakthrough designs. Let's hope at least some of them can be preserved as tangible proof of his creative genius. Lexcen's influence on 25 years of Australian sailing surely deserves commemoration. Yet what endures most powerfully about Ben for me is the memory of his personality. The media – when he could be bothered to speak with them at all – relied on Lexcen for quotes of disarming frankness. Asked to comment on a dismal regatta steering a Soling through the endless windshifts of the 1972 Olympics he reckoned he needed ‘two years of practice in light weather, and a seeing-eye dolphin'.