Sometimes a story starts in the most unexpected way.
I was having a clear-out recently when I came across the Official Programme from the 2000 Kenwood Cup in Hawaii. I hadn’t looked at it for years. Flicking through the pages and finding the crew lists brought back a flood of memories, before I realised something else — it was almost exactly 26 years since we had been there racing.
For me, the 2000 Kenwood Cup was very special. I had only been living in Australia for a couple of years and suddenly found myself representing my new home in Hawaii, sailing aboard Neill and Jane Whiston’s Beneteau 40.7 Fruit Machine.
Looking back, I would have to say it became the pinnacle of my yacht racing career (so far).
And at the time, none of us knew we were taking part in the last Kenwood Cup.
A formidable Australian team
The Kenwood Cup was international team racing on a grand scale. Australia went to Hawaii in 2000 with an official three-boat team comprising Geoffrey Ross’s Farr 49 Yendys and the matching Beneteau 40.7s Fruit Machine and Smile, the latter owned and skippered by Neill’s brother Simon Whiston.
Bumblebee 5, John Kahlbetzer’s Sydney 62 skippered by Iain Murray, was the Australian reserve, while another Australian Beneteau 40.7, Clayton Craigie’s Mojo Rising, also competed.
Fruit Machine, Smile and Yendys hadn’t simply been selected on reputation. They had earned their places through the Australian selection series, the 1999 Telstra Cup — a series won by Fruit Machine.
That fact made me smile when I rediscovered it, because the Beneteau 40.7 wasn’t necessarily everyone’s idea of a grand-prix racing yacht.
The two Whiston boats had acquired a less-than-flattering nickname – the “beachballs”. A name still used to refer to these boats.
They were production cruiser-racers with decidedly rounded hulls and could have a tendency to bounce their way through a seaway. They had, however, been heavily optimised for racing.
And the beachballs could be quick.
The Fruit Machine crew
Finding the programme really became interesting when I reached the crew lists.
Our skipper was Michael Mottl, with Murray Spence navigating. The crew included Adam Beashel, Steve McConaghy, Matty Day, Chris Hosking, Jane Whiston, Mark Jones and me.
It was a great little team.
Matty Day and his great mate Chris Hosking were very much at the core of the team Jane and Neill had put together. Matty was one of the younger members of our crew, full of enthusiasm and very much part of what made that campaign what it was.
Sadly, Matty is no longer with us. RIP Matty.
Looking across the other Australian crew lists today is equally fascinating.
Yendys included names such as Grant Simmer and Ian Walker, while Bumblebee 5 was skippered by Iain Murray with Ian Burns navigating and a crew that included Michael Coxon.
At the time, they were some of the very good Australian sailors gathered in Hawaii.
Twenty-six years later, the programme reads rather differently.
Pinching myself off Diamond Head
Interestingly, some of my strongest memories aren’t of race results.
I remember sailing off Diamond Head, looking around and quite literally pinching myself. Was I really doing this?
I’d arrived in Australia only a couple of years earlier and here I was, racing for an Australian team in the Kenwood Cup off Hawaii.
There are moments in sailing that remain with you long after you’ve forgotten which tack you took or where you finished in a particular race. Diamond Head is one of those for me.
The other great memory is Molokai.
I remember sailing back past the island in the early morning, with the huge vertical cliffs towering above us and waterfalls seemingly dropping straight down from the top.
It was spectacular.
You don’t forget something like that (nor the redress given to Smile for responding to a distress call).
Can you get a beachball to plane?
Then there were the considerably less serious challenges.
With the Pacific rollers rolling through, we decided that surely we could get Fruit Machine onto the plane. We tried. And tried. The beachball wasn’t having it.
We failed.
Perhaps that wasn’t surprising. Contemporary reports from the final Molokai Race describe Ken Read’s Farr 50 Esmeralda surfing the swells off Diamond Head and accelerating through 14, 15, 16, 17 and eventually 18 knots.
Somewhere out there, we were trying to persuade a Beneteau 40.7 cruiser-racer to do the same thing.
You can’t blame us for trying.
The beachballs bite back
What the 40.7s lacked in surfing ability, however, they made up for on corrected time.
The 2000 series began in very un-Hawaiian conditions after the remnants of Tropical Storm Daniel interfered with the normally dependable trade winds.
In the opening race, Fruit Machine took line honours across the fleet, with sistership Smile just three minutes behind. On corrected time we won our class ahead of Smile, helping Australia take the early lead in the Kenwood Cup.
As the series progressed, the two sisterships continued to battle each other.
Neill summed it up nicely in a contemporary interview when talking about the rivalry between Fruit Machine and his brother’s Smile: “we were constantly trying to climb over the top of each other, but ultimately the important result was Australia winning the Kenwood Cup.”
And Australia very nearly did.
Going into the final Molokai Race, the Australian team was leading defending champion New Zealand by 391 points to 383.
Meanwhile, the three Australian Beneteau 40.7s were sitting first, second and third in Class D — Smile, Fruit Machine and Mojo Rising.
Not bad for three beachballs.
Everything came down to Molokai
The final 148-mile Molokai Race carried triple points, so there was still everything to play for.
It turned into a complicated finale.
Smile and New Zealand’s Big Apple III both diverted to assist in the search for Cha-Ching, which had lost its mast and requested assistance. The resulting redress hearings continued after racing had finished and played a part in determining the final standings.
Out on the water, New Zealand was also putting together the performance it needed.
Yendys couldn’t save enough time against the New Zealand boats and the Australian advantage began slipping away.
Ultimately, New Zealand won the final Kenwood Cup with 535 points to Australia’s 521.
Fourteen points.
After an entire series of international yacht racing, that was all that separated us.
There was some consolation for Australia. Smile finished as the top-scoring individual yacht of the entire series, while Fruit Machine finished third in the IMS cruiser-racer pointscore.
But we had come very, very close to bringing the Kenwood Cup back to Australia.
Twenty-six years later
Perhaps the most fascinating part of rediscovering the programme has been looking at the names again.
There was an extraordinary amount of sailing talent in Hawaii.
One of the sailors aboard Yendys was Grant Simmer. Today, 26 years later, Simmer is CEO of Australia’s challenge for the 38th America’s Cup.
The skipper of our reserve boat Bumblebee 5 was Iain Murray, who has subsequently become one of the most recognisable figures in international race management through his involvement as Race Director in the America’s Cup and SailGP.
And racing against us was another name familiar to just about everyone in sailing today.
Ken Read skippered the Farr 50 Esmeralda.
Esmeralda was flying by the end of the Kenwood Cup, winning five consecutive races including that final Molokai Race. Read is now CEO of the American challenger for the 38th America’s Cup.
Then there were people such as Adam Beashel, Steve McConaghy, Ian Walker, Ian Burns, Michael Coxon and many others whose careers would continue at the highest levels of the sport.
Looking at the programme now, it really was a who’s who of yacht racing.
At the time, of course, I don’t remember thinking about any of that.
They were simply the people we were sailing with and against.
The last Kenwood Cup
What none of us realised as we packed up after the racing in Hawaii was that there wouldn’t be another one.
The Kenwood Cup had become one of international sailing’s great team competitions, but 2000 proved to be its final edition.
That’s a shame.
There was something special about bringing together national teams consisting of different boats and crews and then combining their performances across inshore and offshore racing. You weren’t simply racing for your own boat. Every result mattered to the team.
Perhaps that’s also why finding the programme now feels particularly timely.
The Admiral’s Cup has returned, bringing international team yacht racing back into focus. At the same time, sailors who were racing around Hawaii with us in 2000 are still helping shape the highest levels of our sport through the America’s Cup and SailGP.
Maybe there is still an appetite for this sort of racing.
Who knows? Perhaps one day an event carrying the spirit of the Kenwood Cup could return as well.
For me, though, finding that old programme has been enough to transport me back 26 years.
Back aboard Fruit Machine.
Back to trying to make a beachball plane down a Pacific roller.
Back to sailing beneath those extraordinary cliffs of Molokai in the early morning.
And back to that moment off Diamond Head when a Pommie who had only just arrived in Australia, looked around at where he was, what he was doing and the sailors around him — and had to pinch himself to make sure it was real.
It was.
Steve Bryant was a member of the Fruit Machine crew at the 2000 Kenwood Cup. This article was prompted by rediscovering his Official Programme from the event, almost 26 years later to the day.
CYCA have a couple of Kenwood Cup articles in their Offshore Magazine archives if you’re interested in having a further read.
https://cyca.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Offshore-Aug-Sept-2000.pdf
https://cyca.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Offshore-October-November-2000.pdf
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