Farr from home: New Zealand's greatest yacht designer, Bruce Farr, talks life and sailing

Bruce Farr in the marina at Annapolis. Photo / Ben Stanley.

By Ben Stanley

The sea is the domain of known unknowns, all connected to the wind.

If you can understand how finely its strength and direction determines your own is to become a great sailor. A great sailor is in total communication with his crew, but, perhaps more so, with his or her ship.

What trust do they place in their shipbuilder and designer? These days, it is founded in a superb technical understanding, fine-tuned knowledge of near-aerodynamic engineering and an absolute faith in the undeniable answer of math.

"I came from the artistic, experimental side of the equation, with very decent maths skills - but I was more of an artist," Bruce Farr tells me, about modern yacht design. "There's probably a lot less room for that today."

We are sitting in the Boatyard Bar & Grill in Annapolis, Maryland, eating crab cakes. It's Christmas Eve last year. The United States is still over three weeks from its first confirmed case of Covid-19.

Farr - easily the finest racing yacht designer of his generation, and perhaps alongside legendary American Olin Stephens as the greatest ever - is midway through a description of what the boatbuilding culture in Auckland in the 1960s and 70s was like.

Along with him, the era produced world-beating Kiwi yacht designers like Laurie Davidson, Ron Holland and Greg Elliott. It was a time, Farr says, where virtually everything in New Zealand felt self-taught with a 'give it a crack' pioneer nature to it.

"New Zealand produced a bunch of good designers who became world class, almost the majority of the best sailors of the world - a huge proportion of them, for every kind of boat," he says.

"[From] big offshore racing boats to America's Cup boats, and, more lately, back into centre boarders. At the same time, the boat building industry in New Zealand boomed in terms of the international market.

"I think it's kind of settled since then, but something went on in that period of the 70s and 80s that made New Zealand produce the best marine people … you can certainly say that was a golden age."

A serious wiry young Aucklander in the 1960s and 1970s when he learnt his trade in his parents' boat sheds around the Auckland region, Farr is a serious wiry 71-year-old now. He looks more like the rule-abiding engineer than the artist, but the success of his designs, and ever-glowing reports of those who sail them, prove otherwise.

From 18-foot skiffs to Whitbread ocean goers, Farr's yachts have won more than 40 world titles. More than 15,000 racing and cruising yachts have been built from his drawings.

The Farr 3.7 dinghy remains an icon to any Kiwi who grew up near the beach, while his Laser 28 was one of the finest widely-produced keelboats of the 1980s, worldwide. Outside Black Magic, his massive 90-foot monohull KZ-1 is the most storied Kiwi America's Cup yacht ever.

Though briefly back in Annapolis, which remains the base of Farr Yacht Design, Farr retired eight years ago. He moved to Central Florida and completely bought out of the company in 2015; the same year he says he last really got out on the water himself. His sailing passion now lies in remote control model yachts.

"It's very mentally challenging, trying to sail a boat from the outside," Farr, taking a sip from a decaf coffee, says. "Everything's inverted so you've got to see what the boat's doing and turn it around in your brain before you take action."

The Kiwi made the US Nationals in Charleston, South Carolina for the first time last October, finishing 20th in the 48-strong metre-long DragonFlite 95 class. Outside his RC models, Farr has stayed busy in retirement with a Lotus track car, his golf clubs and a condo in Aspen, Colorado which he and wife Gail escape to for two months every year for skiing (winter) and hiking (summer).

Farr's beloved DF95 remote control boat. Photo / Bruce Farr.

He was caught there when the pandemic hit and drove all the way back to his home in The Villages, Florida - a nearly 3000 kilometre road trip - in a rental car to avoid airports.

"I lived such a horrid paced life when I was working that when I retired I was actually ready to stop," he says. "I anticipated I had trouble breaking away from it, but I didn't really. Lots of other things to do at the time, I never really looked back."

Though regular trips back to New Zealand ended when his mother Ilene died in 2018 (his father passed away in 2006), there are plans to watch the America's Cup challenger series in Auckland next year if it's still held. Farr says he misses the temperate climate of home but is intending to spend his silent season in the States.

His Florida home lies in a sprawling first-class retirement development that houses more than 120,000 and is considered one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in America. A regular stop for Republican politicians, including the President last October, Donald Trump received 70 per cent of the vote in The Villages.

Farr's childhood home in Leigh, near where his Scottish-born father Jim was a commercial fisherman at nearby Ti Point. His son first started working on boats at 13, with his first real builds Moth and Cherub sailing dinghies and 18-foot skiffs.

By 1971, a 22-year-old was working out of his mother's sewing room, designing his first keelboat. Designed for Rob Blackburn, the 26-foot 'Titus Camby' won the New Zealand Half-Ton Championships in 1972 and 1974 and really helped put Farr on the map.

"They were heady times for me," he says. "At that time, I'd just started up on my own as a designer and builder. I saw [the Titus Camby] as a huge challenge, because the only experience I had was the experience of other people's keel boat designers.

"The number of hours was just exponentially out of proportion to the finished product, because I wanted to do it well. I guess that's a failing I've had all my life. I accept nothing except the absolute best I can do."

Farr expanded into his own downtown workshop later that year, before setting up his first full-time design office in Parnell in 1975 where rising yacht design stars Russell Bowler, Roger Hill and Peter Walker would eventually join him.

The late 70s were a boon for the office, with Farr-designed yachts winning quarter-ton, half-ton and one-ton offshore world championships. With an increasing market in cruising yachts and tired of constant long-distance travel to Europe, Farr relocated to Annapolis in 1981 with four of his five Kiwi staff joining him.

A rough start in the States parlayed into another hot stretch that saw his competitive yachts shine and plenty of business come from the Northern Hemisphere's wealthy elite. Farr has been included on NZ's Rich List before and will only admit to being "comfortable" with the spoils his work has bought him.

"If we stayed in New Zealand we would have been a small piece of the world market and we might spend the rest of our lives wishing we'd done something different," Farr says.

"If we moved to the Northern Hemisphere, we'd know we gave it our best shot. We figured out how to do fast boats under the new version of international offshore rules that were still nice boats to sail, not big heavy turkeys. Away we went for our second golden years that, instead of lasting three or four years, lasted, I guess, almost twenty."

Bruce Farr in the marina at Annapolis. Photo / Ben Stanley.

Along with a host of famed Whitbread ocean racers, Farr designed New Zealand's 1986 and 2000 America's Cup entries, along with KZ1, which he sailed himself on off San Diego.

The retiree will give you a wry grin when you ask about how different the America's Cup is today - with its AC50 wing sail catamarans - from when he was last seriously involved with Oracle in 2003 (he acted as a consultant for the Paul Cayard-coached Desafio Espanol challenger in 2007).

"It's really now about what's the fastest boat you can produce, within some pretty open restrictions," he says. "The concept of the controls point towards a very fast boat, and you've got quite a bit of freedom to produce something different and faster. I think that's what the America's Cup should be.

"There's an argument to be made that they're barely sailboats anymore. That's a genuine argument. As I said about the last America's Cup; they're, technically, poor, low-flying aircraft.

"The whole objective now is to sail around the course without the hull being in the water. Well, that begs the question: is it a sailboat? Is it a boat? Now, I don't have a conclusion either way. It's just where things go; better and faster. Well, at least, faster. Better or worse doesn't matter as long as they're faster."

After being at the front of the fleet for decades, the quest for speed on the water, for the mastery of the wind and trust of the sailor, is behind Farr now. The competitive edge comes with the remote control, while he finds his old charges still pop up in his life relatively frequently.

Indeed, his Annapolis Christmas trip included salvaging old drawings for the recently bought, still-sailing Titus Canby.

If he was a young buck again today, Farr fancies that he'd probably have stayed a sailor, his original passion. He reckons his feel for design would no longer fit the modern approach to boatbuilding.

"People believe that the tools can tell you the answers without having to go look at boats or build boats," Farr says. "We've lost the pioneers - now it's a technical era. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just different."

After all, in the domain of known unknowns, whatever brings you home will always be a beautiful boat.