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The Long Road to Double World Titles


Karl Purdie's formative years ensured that sailing was in his future. On the front lawn of the family home in Rotorua, his father built several keel yachts and from very early years, Karl was part of the family cruising holidays in the Hauraki Gulf and the Bay of Plenty. But at that time, nobody had an inkling how far this young lad's sailing career would go.

When he was eight years old the family moved to Tauranga, the coastal City on the Bay of Plenty north of Rotorua. There, he was given his first P Class. The P Class is an historic, New Zealand junior trainer, seven feet long and despite it's more than 60 years, is still a stepping-stone from the Optimist, into intermediate youth classes. However Karl's first P Class yacht was extremely heavy and in his words, 'by no means, a racing machine!'

At age 13 he started sailing P Class seriously and did his first Tauranga Cup regatta at age 14. This is an inter-club event sailed at the conclusion of the Tanner Cup regatta, the inter-provincial championship and national pinnacle of P Class sailing. Many of the great Kiwi sailors of today have their names inscribed on the Tanner and  Tauranga Cups. However, Karl's first experience of national competition, at Plimmerton, north of Wellington was a wake-up experience - he fared badly. But it was a lesson along the road to success.

'On Lake Rotorua, we had this regatta called the Wihau Shield at Easter and if you got into the top five after three races it became a swap boat series among the top five.' Says Karl. 'Craig Monk was in the regatta that year, he was about the same age as me, as were the other three guys in the final five and when I got into their boats I started winning races. It became instantly obvious that my P Class boat was a bit of a dog!'

Karl got a new P Class for his last year in the class and he represented Bay of Plenty finishing sixth in the Tanner Cup contest and eighth in the Tauranga Cup regatta, at Timaru, in the South Island.

Karl then moved into Lasers and became involved in the Youth Training Scheme where Harold Bennett was the national coach. Harold ran a very well organized and structured training regime. 'There we had access to many really good coaches.' Says Karl. 'Russell Coutts, Chris Dixon, Glen Sowry, John Irvine and John Cutler, guys who were seven or eight years older than me, but young enough to relate well with their student sailors.'

Karl spent a couple of years in the youth training environment and rose to third nationally and then moved into open Lasers. He entered his first open Laser National Championship in Wellington and fared badly, finishing twentieth.

It was then time to go to University to study engineering and he chose Auckland University, mainly for the proximity of great sailing competition. He then proceeded to progress his sailing career at the expense of his engineering studies to the point where the University told him that if he didn't pass some papers they would, quote, 'kick him out!'

'So sailing took a backseat for a couple of years.' Continues Karl. 'I still managed to improve my ranking among the Auckland Laser fleet. Although I was only doing weekend sailing, I was competing with the best top ten in the country. I gained top ten finishes in several Laser national regattas and among them, two second place finishes. I also did some 470 racing in Auckland after I got a bit tired of the Laser. I teamed up with Mark Milburn, (he was forward hand), who had won the national youth trials where I was third.'

The pair sailed the 470 for less than a year and improved from nowhere to third at Olympic Sail, but the arrangement fell apart when Karl's exam time clashed with the 470 Worlds in Japan, for which they had qualified. Mark had to find a new crew and Karl returned to racing his Laser. He worked his way back up the rankings to third by the time he had to shift to Wellington to take up a job as a metallurgist.

But sailing in Wellington, where the standard was nothing like that in Auckland and his standard dropped significantly. He realised that without that standard and some overseas competition as well, he would go nowhere in Lasers from there on.

At about that time, Stewart Thwaites had brought the Davidson 55 Starlight Express to Wellington and Jamie McDowell was charged with putting a crew together. 'Somehow,' says Karl, 'I was invited to be mainsail trimmer! I'd never done any keelboat racing in my life so going on to a 55 footer for the first time, it seemed huge and then to be put in charge of the mainsail was mind-blowing! I didn't let on though! I tried to look as though I knew what I was doing and they seemed to be reasonably pleased with the outcome.'

'That was the start of some really enjoyable years of keel-yacht sailing at Port Nich (the Royal Port Nicholson Yacht Club). We did the Hamilton Island regatta, Sydney Hobart's, Auckland Noumea, Auckland Fiji races - we racked-up quite a few thousand ocean racing miles in a short time.'

'Stewart would get guys to sail on the boat, like Roy Dickson for instance. Just a totally, awesome guy. Really intense. And you learnt such a lot by watching him.'

Karl got to sail with Joey Allen at one of a Starlight Express Hamilton Island Regatta visit. He learnt a lot from watching Joey's approach to interacting with the crew and how he organised the foredeck. Stu. Bannatyne made a lasting impression on Karl: 'A very professional sailor and the best helmsman I've ever seen. So fast and he steers a boat so smoothly! But of course, by then he'd done a few Volvo's, so how many thousands of miles of ocean racing had he done by then?'

'You'd like to think you'd be pretty good at the end of all that and he certainly was. Just an awesome guy really, really competent and dedicated. You look at Stu Bannatyne and Roy Dickson and think, yep, that's how you should do things. There were many other good people I sailed with on that boat, but those two are the stand-outs!'


Winning form gave Karl Purdie his first OK Dinghy World Championship, in Germany 2008. Photo © Pepe Hartmann.
But crew politics became a bit much for Karl after a while and just at a time when he was looking out for a new sailing challenge.

'Greg Wilcox had won the OK Dinghy World championship the year before, I knew Greg and I thought, well, if he can do it, then maybe I can do it as well. Added to that, all the club sailors at Worser Bay had all placed in the top ten at various Worlds, so I knew that if I could beat these guys, I could go overseas and have an equal shot at getting in the top ten there.'

'So, with the help of Matt Stechman, I got a really good OK from Napier and started racing with the Worser Bay Boating Club OK fleet. My first Nationals was a really windy affair, here in Wellington and I capsized in every race, finishing ninth overall. I even capsized in a five knot race and made a bit of a name for myself.'

At that time carbon fibre masts had just been introduced, so Karl never really knew about aluminium masts. The first carbon fibre masts were generally, just stiffer versions of the aluminium masts and it wasn't appreciated what you could do with carbon.

'My first mast was pretty much the same as everyone else's,' says Karl. 'But having come from lasers and knowing about looking for the bendy bottom section mast, I thought I should apply that thinking to the OK mast. And having read Paul Elvstrom's book, about the fastest Finn masts are also those that bend a lot below the boom and are very fast just before they break, I thought, I'll send my mast back up to Ginge (C Tech) and get him to make it as bendy as possible around the goose neck area, without it breaking.'

'He did that for me,' continues Karl, 'and the mast was a revelation. I went from being slow in a breeze, to being probably the fastest in a breeze. Others followed this style of mast and the new generation masts were made with this new flexibility built in.'

A year later, Karl went to his first OK Worlds in Belmont, on Lake Macquarrie, Australia. By then he had purchased a new generation C Tech mast and he finished fifth in that regatta, having been third overall until a poor last days racing dropped him from the podium.

He came away from that regatta thinking that if he stuck at it he had the potential to win a World Championship. He had learnt a lot from watching Nick Craig (GBR) and Jorgen Lindhartsen (SWE), who finished first and second at the regatta.

'At that stage they were streets ahead of everybody else in rig development.' Says Karl. 'I don't know if they knew why they were fast, but they were! I came home with a CD of photos and I analysed  them. I took measurements off the photos and compared them with my own mast bend and it became pretty obvious that our masts were too soft sideways. However their masts didn't have the bend down low.'

'So, that winter I stiffened my mast up - glued some carbon strips on the top of it and stiffened it up sideways. I went to Poland and did the Worlds, finishing third.  The only bad thing about that trip, from my point of view, continues Karl, 'was, that Mark Perrow out-designed everyone by getting Southern Spars to buld him the first high-modulus carbon mast, whereas, until then we'd all used standard or intermediate modulus. With high modulus the mast springs back quicker, it's more resilient and the gust response is better.'

'So that means, when a gust hits you the mast will bend, but then spring back quicker, so the leach isn't open as long, so you point higher and that basically was the difference between the first carbon masts and the old alloy masts. They weren't any faster they just pointed the boat higher. So when Mark got the first high-modulus mast, that again, was the difference.'

So it was then very obvious to everyone, that they would all have to go high-mod, Karl sold his mast to Tomas (Hanson-Mild) went home to New Zealand and got C Tech to make him a high-modulus mast.


World title number two. Wellington Harbor 2010. Photo © Will Carver.
'It was easily the stiffest mast in the fleet and everyone else thought it would not be the way to go.' Says Karl. 'But it turned out it was the mast I won the World's with. Once I sorted out the sail to match the mast, the boat was a rocket! At the German Worlds, once the breeze started to blow, I was the fastest there.'

'The sail on that mast had luff round, because the mast bent a bit between the bands. With twelve kg weight hanging off the tip of the mast and you put a string line between the bands, the deflection was 92 mm.'

'I'd always said that I wouldn't go to Sweden for the following Worlds, but having won the German regatta, the expectation was that we'd go to Sweden to defend the title. With the 2010 Wellington regatta coming up after that, we needed someone in Sweden to sell the idea of some of them coming to New Zealand. So we had to go to Sweden!'

The freight cost to send one boat to Sweden were prohibitive, but it just so happened that Alistair Deaves had built a new 'Ice Breaker' hull for a German sailor. Karl came to an agreement with the owner, that if he paid for the freight to Germany, he could use the new boat at the Swedish 2009 Worlds. Karl loaded his old mast in with the new boat and when he raced the boat in Sweden, it was like sailing his own boat, apart from a slightly different deck gear layout.

Karl and Tomas Hanson-Mild battled out ten races and Tomas took the World Title off Karl by one point!

'It was really gutting at the time.' Says Karl. 'I'd lost the Nationals, and the Inter-Dominions (NZL v AUS) to Mark Perrow, by the same margin. Two major contests that I could have won and should have won but lost both of them by one point! The good thing from all of this when I came away from Sweden, was that it really revitalized my interest in winning the Worlds back again. It's the old thing about not knowing what you've got until you lose it!'

'The thing that surprised me at the Swedish regatta was the distance between Tomas and myself and the rest of the fleet. When the breeze was 15 to 18 knots, we'd finish a minute ahead of the third boat. We basically match raced on or own.'

Before Karl left for Sweden he had already started down another new mast design track, mainly because while the new boat and his own mast was in transit to Sweden, via Germany, he needed a mast to continue sailing his own hull at home. He'd messed about with a few ideas for a while and then thought, well, why not make a high-mod carbon mast, really stiff between the bands, so that the sail is essentially broad seam shape. A sail with no luff-curve in it at all that will set on a straight mast.

'I considered that the idea would be very fast in light weather,' said Karl, 'and the advantage of that is also that you can build a lot more roach on the sail, so the boat is very fast downwind. The difference between the new high-mod mast and the old high-mod mast is as dramatic as the difference between the older high-mod version and the intermediate-mod mast.'

'Using the new mast, the boat was like sailing a Laser. In every little puff of wind the boat would accelerate. It is really, really quick. But the trick was to get it going upwind in moderate and heavy air, without being overpowered. The trick there, that I now know, is the amount of twist that you design into the sail and that comes down to how straight the exit is on the leech. Greg's (Wilcox) sails have a lot of twist in them, compared to the North sails and somewhere in between, there is a really good sail. We are narrowing in on it, but haven't quite achieved as yet.'

For the 2010 World's Karl measured in both masts and on the first windy day of the pre-worlds he used his old mast and won the two races sailed. On the second day he used his new mast. On the last day of the pre-worlds it blew quite hard and he wanted to know how the new mast would go against good international competition if he got caught out using it out of it's range.

So he took it out as an experiment and it went really well. Two firsts and a second on the windiest day, twenty-five knots! So he knew immediately that it didn't matter which mast he used in a breeze, they were going to be as fast as each other as he had managed to get the sail design to compensate for the shortcomings of a stiff mast in a chop and big breeze. He went on to use both in the World Championship regatta and as history now shows, apart from a couple of incidents, in 2010, he became OK Dinghy World Champion for the second time.

'From quite a long way out I'd been predicting that this 2010 World Championship was going to be really close.'  Says Karl. 'With the level of competition that's here in New Zealand and Australia and the standard of the guys coming from further overseas, I thought that consistency would pay. So often it's not how your good races will win you a series but how well you recover in your bad races.'

'And I think that was the difference really. I could recover from my bad races a little better than the other guys and it was, a really close series.'