Once upon a time, Scott Fyfe and three good mates built an out-there race boat: the Young Rocket 31 Extreme, still seen most Friday nights out contesting the RNZYS Rum Race under her current owner. Now 30-odd years later – a little older, but still with the same desire for speed and thrills – Scott Fyfe has dialled up the new boat of his dreams with designer Rob Shaw.
Shaw 1050 Illuminate is a little longer than Fyfe’s original racer, at 10.5m overall, but she’s got the same huge cockpit and generous beam – almost equivalent to a TP52 – courtesy of her curvaceous wings. She’s also of full carbon construction, built by Fyfe’s brother-in-law Stu Bettany, himself a pro sailor, and lead builder Neville Thorpe at Bettany’s Fusion Marine Boatbuilders in Silverdale. The boat’s a showcase of Kiwi design and ingenuity, with engineering by Pete Lawson of Hauraki Consulting, a full-carbon rig and fibre running rigging by NZ Spars and Rigging, and a sharp-looking suit of carbon laminate sails from Doyle, including a square-top main and a massive gennaker.
Fyfe, previously a dinghy sailor himself, started reminiscing about the fun he used to have on Extreme back in the day. As his kids neared the end of their international centreboard careers, Scott and his wife Tania decided they wanted to build something the kids and friends could all enjoy sailing together.
“All my kids have done the competitive centreboard stuff and up to 29er/49er sort of level, and the dream was to get them all back together on the race boat at some point,” Fyfe says. “I just wanted a simple, fast boat that would be fun to sail for everybody.”
Fyfe turned to sportsboat and racing keelboat designer Rob Shaw of Shaw Yacht Design, whose mid-size designs, such as the 9m Karma Police and its sister ship Blue Dude, 12m Clockwork (formerly Blink), and 11m Little Nico and Akatea II (now Shaw Thing), have performed strongly both locally and in Australia.
“Generally people don’t come to me looking for a standard boat – they’ve usually got an idea about something that’s a bit different and a bit interesting, which is good,” Shaw says. “Scott was great to work with because he had a really good idea of what he wanted. He’s had experience with a similar style of boat before with Extreme, so this boat borrows some of the ideas from that and develops them a bit further.”
Fyfe was keen for the yacht to have a generous beam and wings which can contain up to 450kg of water ballast on each side, instead of generating stability with a canting keel. It couldn’t just have a deep fixed keel, however: it also needed to have a reasonably shallow draft, in order to get to and from Bettany’s yard up the Weiti River, so a lifting keel with a 2.8m draft was designed.
“Scott was looking for something that was a development of the concept of a boat that relied on crew weight for power and stability rather than just keel weight,” Shaw says. “Many of my recent designs have been canting keel boats, in an attempt to get power into the boats without adding weight. This boat’s really coming at it the other way around, using the weight of the crew to generate the power.”
The result is a sleek-looking raceboat with a touch of the aircraft carrier about it: a hugely wide cockpit with wings containing water ballast, tapering to a narrower shape forward with a low-profile cabin and angled topsides with a generous gunwale bevel to minimise weight and windage. And a plumb bow. Part of the prod is fixed, with a bob stay, to generate plenty of luff tension when tight reaching under a code zero, plus there’s a retractable extension for flying asymmetrical sails. Graphics on the bow and wide, open transom spell out the name, chosen by Fyfe’s kids after a drum-and-bass track by Wilkinson. (Afterglow, the title of another Wilkinson banger, was already taken.) This is a boat that looks like it means business, and painted a striking shade of metallic charcoal it is certainly one to turn heads out on the racecourse.
Illuminate is tiller-steered, like a big dinghy, and two-metre-long extension provides fingertip-control of the beautifully finished carbon tiller and the through-hull rudder beneath it. The traveller is mounted across the stern, the continuous mainsheet running forward in a tube under the deck on each side to winches forward of the helm position. Controls for the traveller itself run forward inside the generous foot chocks.
There’s another pair of winches on the side decks further aft, for the running backstays, and a third pair on the side deck next to the cabintop, for jib trim. All these winches are Karver, and are four-speed, changing gear automatically as load comes on to provide improved speed and control when trimming (particularly useful when hauling in the main or when gybing the gennaker and needing to get lots of sheet in fast, the crew report). A bank of Harken clutches and a dedicated winch for sail control lines sit on a central member between the twin companionways. The cockpit floor is covered in panels of soft yet grippy U-Dek, with a non-skid paint finish on the wings and side decks.
It’s not all race-boat: there is a simple but functional area down below. With the addition of some snazzy bright orange squabs the clear-finished carbon cabin assumes a level of comfort, and eye-level windows and LED strip lighting mean it’s far from dark. There’s room to sleep six in large quarter berths under the cockpit and along the cabin sides, and a carbon-finished pump toilet. There’s full standing headroom in the centre of the cabin if you’re not terribly tall (like myself, at 1.63 metres), and easy headroom to comfortably sit on the berths under the side decks.
There are some particularly nice touches, such as the custom-made circular throttle control for the 20hp outboard (tucked away in a well under the cockpit floor), set into the side of the port ballast tank, made by Grant McKinnon of Wind Warrior Yachts. McKinnon also developed the headboard system with enables the square-top main to be hoisted and locked off. The crew are taking their time to come to terms with all the bells and whistles and cool systems; as Bettany says, “There are so many Gucci things even we don’t know how it all works.”
Illuminate’s maiden outing came in the Coastal Classic, when there wasn’t quite enough wind for her to really get flying, but the ride home more than made up for it.
“The trip up wasn’t exactly blowing our socks off, but certainly coming home was fantastic,” Bettany says. “It was a nice reach, and with the full water ballast in and five crew, just blasting down the coast was absolutely fantastic – it was such a good ride.”
We got a taste of what it would have been like on the day of our test sail, heading out onto the Waitematā in a brisk spring southwesterly that promises a full-noise kite ride out towards Bean Rock and beyond, and a bit of an upwind slog home. For our sail Fyfe has assembled a crew of keen young sailors who bring an impressive combination of enthusiasm, smarts and strength – along with the builder and the designer, on his first sail. We quickly find that the older generation are not really required, as the young guns get everything set up and ready to go.
After a tight two-sail down the harbour, where we start to feel the boat’s potential, even though it’s reasonably fresh we decide we have enough capable hands to throw up the masthead gennaker. Then man, we are off.
With the windward tanks full, she feels powerful and stable, and highly responsive to the very light helm. We quickly find out what happens when you get hit by a surprise gust, though –a wipe-out of spectacular proportions, which she recovers from surprisingly easily.
She powers up easily and, with the crew and water weight, picks up to a boat speed nearly matching the wind speed in a breeze just over 20 knots and flat water. The ride, for a Shaw boat, is surprisingly dry, the wings keeping the spray out of the cockpit, but we do get the odd wet one over the front.
On the way back, it’s all hands on the wing going upwind, but steering remains light and responsive, and she sits nicely in the groove under full main and number two jib. Tacking requires an extra pair of hands for the running backstays, but the cockpit is open and uncluttered, and it’s easy to make the crossing and settle in on the new side, using the generous foot chocks for bracing.
Offering speed, thrills and ease of sailing with just enough technicality to challenge and excite the whole family, Illuminate is carrying on the spirit of Fyfe’s original Extreme, with all the benefits of modern design and technology. She’s certainly set to cast a whole new light on Auckland’s mid-size raceboat scene.
