SP41 – The Age of Helios

In 1968 Ian (Biggles) Higham sold the farm in Narrogin and brought an aeroplane and house in Applecross and immediately joined the nearest yacht Club. Thus the Highams arrived at SoPYC with a home-made yacht for Biggles and a Pelican for me. The SP41 was built by my grandfather (Gordon Abbott) in Bunbury and lived in the shed at the beach house in Dunsborough but was towed up to Perth in 1968 to join the SoPYC. It was aptly named Aeronautic paying homage to Biggles' great loves of Flying and Sailing. Biggles then moved onto the Dragon Class where Max Bourne taught him how to race a one design yacht.

Sp41 Helios

Some years on in 1976 Rolly Tasker built a series of IOR optimised 34 foot sloops. There were 5 of them and Helios was one of the most heavily raced of them all. In 1978 Biggles and John (Abbo) Abbott brought the yacht to campaign in the river and in the SoPYC’s offshore races. It had a couple of successes offshore winning the Fremantle to Mandurah in 1979 (remember WA79?) The 34 fleet was quite strong in those early days with Helios battling it out against the UFO and S&S 34s such as Bill Walby’s Swagman (still racing at RPYC), Uforic (resting poorly behind the Mens Shed), Aries,

Morning Star, Solitaire and Wandering Star to name just a few over the years. Those years were full of larger than life characters. The likes of Big Hoss, PC John Forde, Garth Curren, Diesel, Peter Vlaar, PC Merve Holst, very young Cliff and Ian Laurence’s, Patron John Court, Biggles, Abbo, Archie (Sargeant) and John Turner were part of the legendary days around the Club, the bar, the pool table and on the water plus a raft of other mischievous characters that only a few will recall from the years of 1968 to 1998. If you want a full list bail Cherry

(Mother) Callcott up in the bar one evening with can of UDL as payment for her stories of our Club’s ratbags.

This Boating Life

Boating, boating and more boating was the way of life in the 80s and the Billy

Runs were the places where reputations were forged. The beauty about owning power boats and yachts was the old fellas preferred to party on the stink boats so the kids got to race to Rottnest and the Dads brought the beer and dinghies. The raft-ups in Parker Point with mighty hangovers were memories hard to lose as were the inevitable tow homes of the busted yachts.

The Makerovers

Yacht maintenance Biggles-style was pretty rural so a paint job involved all the crew in overalls around the slipway 4 litres of Berger Outdoor all weather (Yellow) a can of antifoul and a roller and brush. The name was stencilled on with dodgy handwriting. Repairs involved removing anything that broke and replacing it with many layers of fibreglass.

In 1996 Biggles retired to Mandurah and I bought a 22 foot cray boat for him and took over Helios. It got its first professional paint job that year and emerged both yellow and shiny for the first time since 1976 and all the missing doors and seats were refitted. In 2003 it got another refit and was reborn in a loud version of white.

In its final resting place in Maylands it has been painted back to Yellow for pure nostalgia so if your cruising up the upper Swan you may spot a misplaced yellow hull along the way. We used to fit more in the cockpit in the bad old days when we were all lightweights!

The Road To Argo

Argo made its way into SoPYC’s offshore fleet by a series of circumstances beginning in 2009 when I took Helios down to Henderson to undergo another full refit. After stripping the yacht, the prognosis was not good when it became clear that a refit would cost far more than the yacht would ever be worth with extensive wood rot throughout the decks. The yacht was eventually stripped and bits and pieces sold off to end up in other yachts around town and the cockpit and nose cone salvaged to become an ‘object de art’ in my back garden in the Upper Swan where it is buried into the hillside more like a peace of jetsam than flotsam.

The lure of a plastic fantastic racing yacht that wouldn’t fall to bits in the ocean (Aka Helios) was too alluring and I was drawn to the annual Mandurah Boat Show (remember those days of decent boat shows!) to see what was on offer for racing yachts and to check out Marks Mawby’s newest offering, the Dufour 34E. In 2009 there was a pretty good selection of race yachts on display including the C&C 34, XYachts, the Dufour34E, Sydney 36s and the Foundation 36 along with wide variety of cruising yachts. The big daddy of the racing offering was Laurie Flynns Archambault RC40. It was a truly great yacht but at half the price the Dufour34E got the nod for a very comfortable yacht that could take on ocean racing. As it had a nice big card table and toilet with a door it also ticked off the Twilight Sailing Remit and thus got the War Office’s seal of approval.

Sp41 Numbers Game

We searched high and low in 2010 for a suitable name for the Heir to Helios as one of the many sons of Helios but Helios’s more notable sons were more noted for their reckless misadventures than their glorious achievements. The Dufour was therefore named without a ny Mythology other than the dark mysteries of the roll of Numbers in yacht racing, business and the card table.

In the meantime Laurie went on to convincingly win the 2010 GBRW IRC racing division (in the days when there were huge fleets) in the Archambault RC40 then named Aaardvark and we commenced our ocean racing journey in Numbers Game and enjoyed good success in the offshore Division 3 fleet including Geograph Bay race Week and a challenging 1st Gero. During this time Laurie Flynn did a deal with Craig Carter to trade down from Aarvark into Craig’s Beneteau 35 Dynamic. Craig changed the yachts name to Hoodoo Man and went on to clean up in the 2011/12 offshore including winning the Siska in the absence of the Grand Prix racers such as Black Betty and General Lee that had dominated for many years.

Aus 11 Argo

It was however proving challenging for Numbers Game to beat the IRC optimised racers and I called Paul Eldrid in to look at optimisation options to get more consistent podium results. At that same time he was helping Craig Carter set up his new Karkeek 47 Indian suggested buying Hoodoo Man might be a better pathway to optimisation than trying to redesign the Dufour Cruiser racer.

A deal was done and Hoodoo Man was bought and pretty much immediately taken away for a refit and rebuild following the rigours of its Siska campaign, to emerge for the last race of the 2012/13 season as Argo Indeed we had finally found a worthy son of Helios being Thersanon who joined the Argonauts on Argo in their