Yendys

Norm Blackman didn't know what he had started back in 1925 when he asked Charlie Hayes to build him an 18-footer. The boat was built, won races, was abandoned during the war, converted to a launch, sunk, salvaged, rebuilt, and inspired a new generation to build replicas. This is quite a saga for one little boat.

Norm Blackman was born on 14-11-1893 at Bermagui on the south coast of New South Wales. As a teenager he moved to Sydney and started social sailing on Sundays, at first as crew in Jimmy Busch's Edward, an old 18 foot open boat, taking over the helm after their skipper Captain Pickles went into retirement. In 1914, when Norm was about twenty-one, he and six of his mates purchased the Eunice 1, built by George Perry in 1908 in Perth, and renamed her Sydney. After a season or two of racing, World War 1 intervened and the boys went to the Western Front. Norm was an original ANZAC in the 17th Battalion, and the whole crew were amongst the lucky ones that returned after the war. In 1921 Norm commissioned George Perry, whom he reckoned the finest builder in the state, to build a new Sydney.

Norm then commissioned Charlie Hayes to build his next boat, named Yendys, which of course is the reverse spelling of Sydney. Her design was revolutionary in that she had a distinctive “snub nose” which gave her a theoretical waterline of 21 feet and performance to match. Charlie Hayes, whose family firm J. Hayes and Sons had moved from Balmain to Careening Cove in 1919, had been building 21-footers for the new Forster Cup class across the bay, and it is thought that building these boats influenced his design of the Yendys, which is similar in shape to a 21-footer but with a cut-off or snub nose.

The christening ceremony for Yendys took place at the Hayes boatshed on the 12th of September 1925. Dubbed a rule cheater from the outset, acceptance into the ranks of the Sydney Flying Squadron came only after a period of widespread disputation. In defiance of her detractors, she proceeded throughout the next decade and a half to regularly race and sometimes even win a championship. Norm Blackman raced Yendys until 1942, competing for seventeen years with the SFS. In the forties, when Australia put away frivolities, Norm joined the war effort and took Yendys to his Ashfield home, and there she stayed for twelve years. She never raced again.

Norm Blackman was a stalwart of the old Sydney Sailing Club and one of the driving forces in the merging of the two clubs in 1925. He held many positions in the Sydney Flying Squadron, including President and Commodore. He passed away on 11 May 1973 at the age of seventy-nine.

The Yendys crew for the State Championships of 1936, 1937 and 1938 were Norm Blackman (owner and skipper), Roger Chamberlain (forward hand), Jack McCarthy (assistant forward hand), Arthur Lubbin (jib hand), Fred Pitt and Harry Keig (well hands), Jim Stewart (mainsheet), and Les Scantlebury, Fred Foster, Claude Calvert and Cecil Calvert (swingers).

The replica was built by Col Bailey and Ian Perdriau and had its first race on 3 March 2007.