From the archives – Casey Smith does MYC proud

Bill Hoffman, Sunshine Coast Daily, January 2012

Try compiling a list of Sunshine Coast professional sportsmen from the past decades who have really nailed it in terms of cashing in on their talent and it’s immediately clear this region punches well above its weight.

Ian Baker-Finch (golf), Pat Rafter (tennis), Chris Van Mullen (motor cycle racing), Joel Parkinson, Gary Elkerton, Mitch Coleborn and Julian Wilson (surfing), Ashley Noffke (cricket) and Ben Ross, Mal Meninga, Craig Polla-Mounter (rugby league), Zane Holmes (surf lifesaving), Chris Munz (horse racing) and Casey Smith (sailing) makes for a pretty impressive list to which there are probably others who could be added.

Hang on a tick … Casey who?

Of the bunch named – and Baker-Finch and Rafter now both retired aside – Smith, the 33-year-old bowman and boat captain of Mar Mostro for the big budget PUMA Ocean Racing Powered By BERG team probably plays his sport on the grandest scale.

His playing field is the world’s oceans and the level at which he competes could only be compared with Formula One racing in terms of budgets, preparation and the hoop la la it generates across the globe.

Casey’s role is a physically tough, solo responsibility at the boat’s pointy end where, at the pace they race, he is constantly very, very wet.

As boat captain it’s also his role to keep track of every item that will need to be fixed or replaced on shore and relay it to the team that tracks the vessel around the world.

The monohulls reach incredible speeds often maintaining more than 30 knots (55.56kph) for long periods of time.

Casey was at the wheel of the 90-foot Rambler the PUMA crew used for a Trans-Atlantic race while their new Volvo 70 footer was being built when it pushed past 40 knots (74.08 kph) powered only by the wind caught by its massive sails.

Currently competing in the Volvo Ocean Racing series in a campaign which will cost his Puma team more than 25 million Euros, Smith will return early next month to his roots at Mooloolaba Yacht Club at The Wharf where he first honed his skills as dinghy sailor.

It will be a flying five-day break after the yachts complete the race’s third leg to Sanya in China.

The last leg, from Cape Town to Abu Dhabi, gives an example of the high stakes, high cost game Smith is playing.

Concern about pirates saw organisers pick up all six 70-foot, 14 ton, fully-rigged yachts and load them onto a container ship to be ferried to a secret location for the final sprint to the finish.

The race’s third leg to Sanya required the same caution with the boats again being taken to a secret start point.

Smith will come home bearing gifts, a vast array of PUMA Racing branded sailing gear, which will be auctioned while he’s here to raise money for the club’s junior sailing program.

“Casey really works hard to keep his connection with Mooloolaba,” yacht club spokeswoman Tracey Johnstone said.

“He got in touch and said he would be back and offered to speak to members and bring gear to raise money for our junior sailing program.”

There are sure to be plenty of bids.

The Volvo series may be a yacht race but is very much about marketing. At every stop on the race route PUMA pushes the brand selling $70,000 to $80,000 worth of gear mid-week from its stands and $150,000 a day on weekends.

Big business, but really small change when compared with the cost of running the team.

Now living at Newport, Rhode Island in New York with his partner Kate and children Sophia, 4, and Noah, 2, Smith may have stepped onto the world stage but has retained continuous financial membership of the Mooloolaba club since he was a child.

Despite a pedigree steeped in a family of fanatical sailors with their own sail making business, he stands out from the Coast’s pack of super sports’ achievers as very much the accidental professional.

While older twin brothers Bucky and Godfrey were national dinghy champions as 11-year-olds, Casey who also has a younger brother Yancy was the one who sailed the least as a kid.

His mother Linda who runs Doyle Sails with her other sons at Moffat Beach said the family still laughs about the course his life has taken.

Casey was into soccer, AFL and loved wind surfing when he was a kid only jumping into a boat occasionally with his brothers when needed.

The arrival of Grant Wharrington’s Wild Thing at the end of the Sydney to Mooloolaba Yacht Race when Casey was about 20 was to change that.

The boys had taken some repaired sails to the boat when they were offered the chance to help sail it back to Sydney in return for meals and a bus ticket home.

Casey didn’t come home. Wharrington offered him the chance to stay and sail to New Zealand for races there and he surprised everyone by jumping at the chance.

“It was a case of being in the right place at the right time,” Linda said.

“By the time they returned to Australia Casey was looking after the boat. He moved to Victoria when he was 20. Grant’s a very good seaman and Casey learnt a lot.”

From there he accepted a dream job in Santa Cruz working for Philippe Kahn, a keen sailor with more than enough money to chase his passion to its limits.

Kahn, a technology innovator and entrepeneur who in the late 1990s developed the first of the in-phone cameras everyone now uses, financed an armada of about 70 boats ranging from dinghies to 52-foot racing yachts.

Casey was sailing in a Melges 25 class regatta in Key West Florida when he made another fortuitous connection.

It was there he met Ken Read the outstanding skipper of the PUMA Ocean Racing team who offered him a contract to take part in the 2008-09 Volvo race on il Mostro.

Smith brought a lot to the team. As well as being a consumate ocean sailor with the experience of numerous Sydney to Hobarts and Trans-Atlantic crossings to draw on, he is also a tinkerer.

His ability to fix things has proven invaluable to the PUMA team. He relaminated the hull of il Mostro while it was under full sail during the 2008-09 race and pulling apart and repaired a malfunctioning water maker.

In his spare time he loves nothing more than tinkering with VW beach bugs, one that he keeps in Australia that has a racing engine he built from scratch and the other at Rhode Island.

But when in the 2008-9 race he was called on to replace il Mostro’s rudder it was not because of his ability to fiddle around and find a solution.

His actions might had won him the series seamanship award but his role was very much part of a well-practiced set of drills that had prepared them for even the most unlikely of eventualities.