Bakewell-White’s boating story begins with his grandfather, the late Richard (Dick) Bakewell.
A lifelong sailor, in 1961 he bought the 11m keeler Jeanette (C23), designed and built by the late Ted Le Huquet in 1933.
Photo: Gareth Cooke/Subzero Images
Not long after buying Jeanette, Bakewell sailed her in the 1961 Trans-Tasman race and, from then on, countless Auckland races and cruises. The well-known Gleam was a regular opponent.
To finish Jeanette’s story here, following a back injury, Bakewell sold her to Evan Berghan in 1974, who circumnavigated her.
Bakewell then bought Oreti, a 1910-built 7.5m launch, from Bruce Farr’s father, Jim. He had used her as a fishing boat out of Leigh. Incidentally, Bakewell-White later inherited Oreti and is close to finishing her restoration.
“I’ve added a hull extension, so she should go pretty well.”
Bakewell-White’s mother, Barbara (nee White), also had a solid yachting background. Besides crewing on Jeanette and racing Zephyrs, Barbara, now aged 87, has long been involved with the Royal Akarana Yacht Club and recently organised their photographic archives.
Born in 1961, Bakewell-White was introduced to sailing early, cruising on Jeanette and then, aged nine, in a Sabot dinghy. He graduated into Zephyrs at age 13 and, a few years later, won the 1980 Auckland Zephyr Championship. He only narrowly missed winning that year’s Nationals to boatbuilder Ian Cook.
“I still have a Zephyr, number 193, which my mother owns.”
Seeking more thrills, Bakewell-White bought a Contender, the 4.2m single-handed trapezed dinghy designed by the late Ben Lexan, which he raced to third place in the 1979 Junior Worlds at Takapuna.
“Beautiful boat to sail, like a mini Flying Dutchman.”
After a stint racing Paper Tigers and A-Class catamarans, Bakewell-White started crewing on Chris Packer’s new Stewart 34, Prince Hal. Bakewell-White spent over a decade crewing for Packer on Prince Hal and his later yacht Starlight Express – harbour races, match racing, Coastal Classics, offshore races, Kenwood Cups and Hamilton Island Race Week.
Bakewell-White completed his Architecture degree in 1985 and began working part-time with an architect. Around that time, a few far-sighted New Zealand yachting enthusiasts attempted to set up a challenge for the 1987 America’s Cup (AC). After a shaky start, merchant banker Fay Richwhite bankrolled the challenge, with Bruce Farr, Ron Holland, and the late Laurie Davidson designing the first GRP 12m yachts.
Thanks to his involvement with Packer, Bakewell-White was invited to try out for one of the crew positions. This was an unpaid position, and he was also expected to put in the hours longboarding KZ3 and KZ5 at McMullen and Wing Boatbuilders.
With Roy Dickson driving them, the crew spent many hours in the gym building fitness, which proved Bakewell-White’s undoing when an ankle injury forced him to drop out.
It was a blessing in disguise. With Farr and Holland overseas, Davidson needed assistance with the construction drawings, and thanks to his architect’s training, Bakewell-White was asked to help.
“My first job was calculating the displacement of KZ3 and KZ5 from the full-sized lofting plans. It took days.”
Davidson liked Bakewell-White’s drawings and offered him more drawing work. The pair got on well, and within a year, Bakewell-White was almost full-time with Davidson.
“Laurie would do the lines, and I’d do most of the construction drawings. I was lucky; Laurie was passionate about boats, and I did an apprenticeship with him. I owe him a lot.”
Bakewell-White spent the next decade with Davidson, becoming essential to his business. The relationship continued when Davidson moved to Bellingham, Washington, USA, in the early 1990s, leaving Bakewell-White to run his New Zealand office.
However, by 1994, Davidson had become heavily involved with Team New Zealand’s 1995 America’s Cup challenge and wasn’t generating much private work, which impacted Bakewell-White’s income. Bakewell-White decided to go out alone as
a yacht designer and quickly scored a vital design opportunity, the 12.5m racing yacht Time to Burn for Rob Bassett.
From the beginning, Bakewell-White differentiated himself by clearly establishing his client’s requirements.
“We have always sought to give our clients the boat of their dreams, not somebody else’s. Establishing what they want to achieve with their boat is essential. I learned this from the architect I worked for, who had been heavily influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright.”
From the beginning, Bakewell-White attracted overseas clients. His first international commission came in 1995 when the Western Australia Yachting Foundation decided to build a 10-boat fleet of match-racing yachts for the inaugural World Match Racing Championship (WMRC). Richard Downs-Honey from High Modulus suggested Bakewell-White put forward a proposal, which he won. Peter Milner Boats built the Foundation 36 fleet and an IRC cruiser/racer version known as the Titan 36.
The original fleet raced hard in Perth for many years before being sold to Malaysia, for the final round of the WMRC.
A second replacement fleet of 10 yachts was built to the same design for Perth.
In 1997, Bakewell-White received a golden opportunity when, thanks to an introduction by Doug Black, the prestigious American designers Sparkman & Stevens (S&S) invited him to apply for their Chief Designer position. This interview in New York went well, and the S&S team offered Bakewell-White the position, which – after many hours of thought – he turned down.
“The job was going to involve a lot of schmoozing at cocktail parties with the New York Yacht Club (NYYC) members, which
I didn’t think was me.”
With fresh confidence in his work, Bakewell-White continued to build his business. He designed the dozen 12m RIBs built by Sensation Yachts for the New Zealand Police to control spectator craft for the 2000 America’s Cup defence.
Stuart Pearce
Bakewell-White then teamed up with Mark Bishop,
a composite GRP engineer with Hi Modulus, and the pair set up an office in downtown Auckland. With a team of six designers, Bakewell-White Yacht Design Ltd was soon busy with more significant projects, including their first superyacht, Spirit, a 35-metre wave-piercing catamaran that later won five superyacht awards, and the 30m race yacht Zana.
“Things were humming; the whole industry was buoyant.”
Unfortunately, Bishop relocated to Florida for personal reasons. Bakewell-White, who admits to not being particularly business-focused, eventually downsized his staff and shifted to
a home office on the North Shore.
Bakewell-White has been very successful in designing powerboats. In 2005, championship winner Peter Turner asked him to redesign the Linder boat he campaigned in the 1990s, which became Sleepyhead. Turner took Sleepyhead to second place in that year’s Class 1 (NZ) Championship and won it the following year.
Turner then sold the boat, retained the name, and commissioned Bakewell-White to design the first of a new Superboat class. Designed to keep costs manageable, this box-rule class sets length and beam parameters, and
a maximum of 1,100 horsepower (two x 550hp engines).
“Peter gave me a pretty free hand for the second boat.”
This second Sleepyhead has won the Superboat class four times.
In recent years, Bakewell-White has received commissions from the Netherlands, Canada and Florida for high-speed, stepped-hull pleasure boats. The first commission was a 12m boat designed to do 55 knots, which did 67 knots. Another 15m did 70 knots, and Bakewell-White designed a 21m boat to do 45 knots. Of course, the massive horsepower required to reach these speeds comes at a cost;
“Those guys go out and burn through 4,000 litres of fuel in an afternoon, which is nuts.”
However, racing yachts remains Bakewell-White’s passion, none more so than his 30.48m yacht Zana. Designed in 2000 for the Sydney-Hobart and built on a tight budget using a second-hand AC rig. Renamed variously Konica Minolta, Lahana and, following an extensive refit in 2013, Rio 100, this yacht has won the TransPac four times, the Barndoor Trophy three times, the Merlin Trophy three times, the Pacific Cup once, as well most of the USA West Coast races.
“We owned the Pacific for a while there.”
While most of Bakewell-White’s race yacht designs have been for overseas clients, he’s designed several for local owners, including the 15.85m canting keeler Wired, the 12.25m Anarchy, and a 6.5m yacht for Chris Sayer’s attempt at the 2003 Mini Transat from France to Brazil. Due to a last-minute rule change, Sayer had to race as a privateer. Despite this and a collision with a ship, Sayer finished in third place unofficially.
One of Bakewell-White’s earlier designs, General Lee, was purchased from Perth by a local yachtsman and, renamed Clockwork, has done extraordinarily well locally. There have been many commissions for modified rigs and foils for existing boats, optimising yachts for shorthanded sailing and one-off projects such as a modern, more easily-handled rig for the classic yacht Iorangi. But sadly, it’s been a decade since anyone local has asked him to design a full-on racing yacht.
“Our whole New Zealand fleet is now 40, 50 years old, and they’re being replaced with foreign imports.”
Bakewell-White is trying to do something about that. With two partners, he’s formed a company, Waka Innovations, to reactivate Kiwi boatbuilding. Two boats – an 11m keeler and
a 12m launch – are in the planning stages, and both are designed to be built here to compete with the imported boats.
“It’s so expensive building boats here because everything on them is imported, and we don’t build in volume.”
However, things are brighter in the local powerboat industry. Bakewell-White has designed all of Innovison’s boats and is currently designing an amphibious boat for Smuggler Marine. He also designed the 12m plywood trimaran powerboat Pacific Zulu, which went exceptionally well with modest horsepower.
“That generated more enquiry than any other boat we’ve done.”
Overseas, Bakewell-White has attracted considerable work from Asia. In the early 2000s, he secured a commission from
a Chinese boatbuilder to design the Atomix range of trailerable powerboats. He spent considerable time with them, helping set up their production systems.
Korea has also been a good source of business for Bakewell-White. In addition to designing two fleets of match-racing yachts and several individual power and sailing boats, in 2013, a Korean syndicate recruited him as Technical Director for their AC challenge.
Following Peter Lester’s advice that foiling catamarans would require apparent wind dinghy sailors rather than the more traditional AC sailors, Bakewell-White helped recruit Chris Draper, Scott Giles, and then Nathan Outteridge for the campaign. However, when the campaign ran out of money, Outteridge and Giles were snapped up by other teams, so Bakewell-White recruited Peter Burling and Blair Tuke for the final two races in the AC 45 lead-up event. Their performance helped convince Grant Dalton they were good enough to become part of Team New Zealand’s ultimately successful campaign in 2017.
“We did some good stuff for that [Korean] campaign – crew choices, working with Doyle Sails and some innovative design concepts – even though it was never recognised.”
Space prevents a complete list of everything in Bakewell-White’s design portfolio; suffice to say it’s unbelievably varied, innovative, and contains some stunningly attractive boats. Commissions have ranged from tenders to superyachts, from redrawing the Zephyr dinghy lines to maxi-race yachts, from a racing dhows to the latest 15m racing catamarans, from amphibious boats to RIBs, from classic yachts to multiple outboard powered craft capable of 60+ knots.
Given this, this writer is amazed more New Zealand clients haven’t beaten a path to his door. Could it be the physical manifestation of that old saying, “A prophet is not without honour except in his own town”?
Kiwis, you’re missing out. If a boat goes through the water – whether sailed, powered, or rowed – Brett Bakewell-White will likely know how to make it go faster, more smoothly and with less effort.
This man’s story is far from over – grab him while you can.
