My oarsome designs

Andrew Mathieson
WALK into Jeff Sykes’s withered farmyard shed and little initially catches the eye.
Odds and ends strewn across the floor are rather run-of-the-mill in rural Ceres.
But look up and an old boat frame hangs precariously from the roof.
By today’s standards, it looks fragile and perhaps antiquated but 32 years ago it was a design that “revolutionised” rowing.
Jeff built it with advice from mentor Derek Barnard to win the single skulls at the 1966 Australian championships.
“My father was a part-time racing shell builder, as he did other things like most people in those days,” Jeff explains.
“I first did an apprenticeship with him as basically a boat builder and toward the end I started to think how boats could be better, so I helped design it with what was a revolutionary – well, revolutionary might be too strong a word – maybe different-shape of a boat.
“It was unconventional at the time but now it’s almost accepted everywhere and has the same principles as Olympic boats are designed on.”
The single-skin, cedar-spruce racing scull would prove the precursor to Jeff Sykes and Associates, a successful Geelong boat building company.
The major change in Jeff’s design was that it was lighter yet stronger than other sculls.
However, as an amateur rower, Jeff was later forced to sell his creation.
“It’s my restoration program now but back in the late ‘90s I knew it had gone out of commission,” Jeff laments.
“It was owned by somebody else and was in pretty bad state of affairs, so I did a deal and swapped it over for a boat that was rowable.”
Now semi-retired, Jeff owns three small hobby farms around the Geelong district.
The 64-year-old is doing with his life what now drives him but admits to falling into boat building by accident rather than will.
“I wasn’t intending on working on boat building at the time,” he says.
“You know, 21 or 22-year-olds have other ideas.
“But after coming up with that boat, people just wanted something similar. I had to make a decision on whether I went my own way or built that boat again.”
The company that Jeff founded and which bears his name now controls around 80 per cent of the rowing boat market in Australia.
The business went from barely a two-man show, Jeff recalls, to employing nearly 50 staff including skilled craftsmen.
Good manufacturing rather than marketing was the secret.
“We were a company that was never without an order list,” Jeff remarks.
Success for the Sykes brand came in the form of a first world championship win in 1974 in the coxless fours and, 18 years on, when Peter Antonie and Steve Hawkins collected gold in the double skulls at the Barcelona Olympics.
“I think the company has had about six Olympic gold medals,” Jeff boasts.
“It would be double or treble that in world championships and double and tripple that again in silver and bronze.”
An accomplished Corio Bay Rowing Club member, Jeff not only won the ’66 heavyweight final but shared in a win during the first dead heat in 1973 to add to another “five or six” lightweight Australian titles.
He finished rowing at the highest level in 1978 after that year’s world championships and five years on took up masters competition, in which he still races.
Growing up in Drumcondra around the corner from Western Beach, Jeff started on the stern of boats coxing for five years until he was 14.
He was desperate to row, not cox, though.
For good reason, too.
“Coxing – let me think, how do a I describe it?” Jeff chuckles.
“You’re a little, young kid coxing, steering old rowers and, like I suppose lots of things, you tend to get blamed for various errors at times.”