FIDELIS and BUCCANEER racing on Auckland Harbour.

415mm x 320mm

Painting dated on the back 1971

Fidelis later owned by Sir Peter Williams The racing career of Fidelis started with a bang when she claimed line honors in the Auckland to Suva Race of 1966.

Under her new owner Jim Devern, she then made her way to Australia to enter that year’s Sydney to Hobart race. Kiwis had ridiculed him when he announced back in the early 1960s that he was going to sail Fidelis across the Tasman and contest the Sydney Hobart. They reckoned the boat would break in half; it didn’t, but they did replace some ribs after that Sydney Hobart. Fidelis was the first New Zealand-built yacht to get the gun in the 628 nautical mile ocean race, recording a then fast time of 4 days 8 hours 39 minutes and 43 seconds. Her next competitor was more than 60 nautical miles astern.

Buccaneer SIR TOM CLARK KB (1917 – 2005) Sir Thomas Edwin Clark (or “Tom” as he was universally known), a co-founder of The New Zealand International Yachting Trust in 1988 with Don St. Clair Brown, was a “giant of a man”, both physically and as an industrialist and sportsman. He was knighted in 1986 for services to industry and sport. Tom then moved on to the water and in the mid-1960’s began a close association with yacht designer John Spencer, building and racing the plywood yachts Saracen, the all black 62 footer Infidel (now famous as “Ragtime”) and finally Buccaneer, the first true maxi yacht built in New Zealand, in which he won the Sydney-Hobart race in 1970 and later took part in major ocean races around the world.