12m owner Don Woods

madforsailing look at one of yachting's most colourful characters, Don Wood, owner of Italia

In 1977 Don bought a 1/4 tonner with Neville Hutton who today builds racing yachts in Lymington and they started racing together. The two of them, along with multihull designer Derek Kelsall came up with the ingenious idea of the 25ft Typhoon - a trimaran using Tornado floats as outriggers and the Tornado rig with a new central hull. They built 20 and raced them in the UK and France.

So began Don's association with racing multihulls. The fact that multihulls at the time were considered a fringe element of the yachting community may have appealed, but more that the lack of restrictions and rules in the multihull community appealed to the pioneering side of his character. In 1984 Don got serious with his multihull racing when an 'opportunity' came his way.

In the OSTAR that year one of the race favourites was the 60ft Ron Holland-designed trimaran Colt Cars GB skippered by Geoff Houlgrave, who had taken over the helm of the boat following the death of the talented offshore sailor Rob James. During the race the boat was damaged and Houlgrave was forced to abandon her and the boat was later found by a passing ship that lifted her on board claiming salvage rights. Don heard about this and managed to prevent the shipping company from off-loading her in Philadelphia and after some negotiation persuaded the ship's captain to drop the stricken tri off by the Isle of Wight on their way back to Antwerp.

The boat duly arrived, was towed into Lymington where it was cleaned up, refitted and given a new rig. So Red Star Night Star was born. Don campaigned the boat actively in France and the UK in the early days of what has developed into the sophisticated ORMA 60ft trimaran circuit.

Motor racing was also a passion of Don's. In 1973 he bought a Cooper T72 which he campaigned for a season. But he reasoned that to be competitive you needed a lot of money and ideally sponsorship. He gave up motor racing until the mid 1980s when he returned with the necessary funding. At his zenith on the race track Don had a fleet of 10 restored classic Formula 1 racing cars until his interest waned and switched back to sailing.

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