He comes from a family background which was virtually a floating nursery.

His father D’arcy Whiting is one of the sport’s real characters, a man of many talents — ranging from carving to painting to skippering ocean racers and to running a successful business. D’arcy is a raconteur par excellence, deeply in love with the sea and increasingly intrigued by the success of his eldest boy amongst the intricacies of yacht design and the rating rule.

Penny Whiting, Paul’s eldest sister, is as versatile and capable on an ocean racing yacht as most men. She runs a sailing school on the Waitemata during the summer months and follows the sun in the winter.

Paul designed his first keel boat when he was 16. This was the highly successful Reactor 25, a somewhat unpretentious JOG (Junior Offshore Group) racer which sailed so sweetly upwind and down, she walked off with more than her share of major regattas. Whiting formed his own company to produce the Reactor in fibreglass and, at the time of writing, 70 of these boats had been built.

Learning as he went, Paul later designed a 46-footer, called Tequila, for his father. This boat was a moderate displacement offshore racer which probably would have been more successful had D’arcy Whiting not had a world cruise in mind when he laid her out and fitted the interior (including a fully equipped workshop).

Tequila was the forerunner of the Reactor 45s, a fibreglass production development of the Tequila lines. Next came Stinger, the light displacement Half Tonner which won the '74 Auckland to Gisborne race.

Stinger was reasonably successful, but no real indication of the international success that was just around the corner for the now 26-year-old Whiting.

The breakthrough, oddly enough, was the product of the success of another young Auckland designer, Bruce Farr, and association with one of New Zealand’s top smallboat sailors, Olympian Murray Ross.

Ross wanted a new design for the 1976 PGH—Lynn South Pacific Quarter Ton contest. He went to Farr who suggested a modified version of his potent stock boat Farr 727 which had won the world Quarter Ton Cup in Deauville (France) in 1975.

But Ross had other ideas and he took his commission and thinking to Whiting whose yard was next door to the Ross and Jones sail loft in Onehunga.

The result was the Magic Bus, the boat which successfully defended the Quarter Ton Cup for New Zealand in Corpus Christi (Texas) last year.

These were the beginnings of one of the most potent partnerships yet in New Zealand yachting.

Whiting became so enthused with what Ross had in mind, he offered to build the boat and partner Ross in the project.

The Bus is now part of yachting history. She won the Pacific Quarter Ton in 1976 with a near perfect 1/1/1/2/1 series, missing out on five straight by just eight seconds in race four of the contest.

Ross and Whiting took their boat to Texas in search of world honours. In the Bay of Corpus Christi and in the Gulf of Mexico, the dinghy-like Magic Bus was just as impressive. She beat a truly representative world fleet to win the title with a 1/1/2/18/2 series.

The 18th came in a light airs raffle in which The Bus was going for a place in the top three with only a mile to the finish but got dumped on the wrong side of a wind change in sight of the line.

It was natural enough that the thinking behind Magic Bus should be carried on up into a bigger Ton boat and, in the midst of preparations for Corpus Christi, Whiting’s company turned out a Half Ton development which Ian Gibbs took to the world Half Ton Cup series in Trieste (Italy). It was a bit of a rush job however and the not fully tuned Candu II did well to finish sixth overall in the maximum 70-boat world fleet.

Ross and Whiting now turned their attentions to the Half Ton scene figuring on a challenge for that class title when the worlds were sailed out of Sydney in December, 1977. They built and prepared Newspaper Taxi for the ‘77 Schweppes South Pacific series in Auckland and won going away with a 1/1/1/2/1 record — the same performance as Magic Bus in the Pacific Quarter Ton a year earlier. The second in this case was the result of an uncharacteristic tactical "blue" by Ross when he failed to cover Helmer Pedersen in the Farr design Cotton Blossom after Taxi had led into the last beat of the Olympic course.

It should, by now, be apparent that the Ross-Whiting combination is a tireless team, chock full of ambition.

And this energy and aspiration was being channeled into a new Whiting design One Tonner even while the highly successful Newspaper Taxi campaign was being waged.

He was talking to Peter Montgomery:
"When did you turn your attention to Ton class designs:"

"Two years ago now. Murray (Ross) came to me with the idea of getting a Quarter Tonner. He knew basically the type of boat he was after but left it to me to achieve it. The closer we looked at the Farr 727s, the more we could see the advantages in the light-displacement and dinghy-style boat. At the time Murray owned the Thomas design Stan’s Family Jewels which was a heavier displacement type Quarter Tonner. We pooled our ideas and the outcome was Magic Bus. A year earlier I had designed the Stinger for John Bonica from Napier. She was the first of my light displacement boats and was reasonably successful, winning the Auckland-Gisborne race. But she wasn’t anywhere as near successful as Magic Bus."

"You had some problems carrying a shy kite in the early Bus days, you couldn’t match the Farr 727s. How did overcome this?

"It was quite simply really. We sat down and worked out that the problem was too much weight forward. When we corrected that we started going past the 727s, whereas it had been the other way around when tight reaching. It is quite incredible just how much bow down trim affects sailing performance. Of course you get good rating allowances from the nose-down set-up. But you still have to achieve the right balance between rating advantage and sailing performance.

"Was Newspaper Taxi just a scaled up version of your Magic Bus thinking?

"The concept was the same, but in many ways the Taxi was a development. Taxi was even lighter in displacement to waterline length ratio with a lot flatter run aft. This meant, in theory anyway, that the Taxi could get up and surf quicker and also reach faster. The Taxi was also slightly developed from Candu II. She was six inches shorter on the waterline with a different bow shape. Taxi’s bow knuckle is quite a bit higher, moving the for’ard inner girth measurement slightly further aft. This helps the for’ard overhang correction which gives you a rating plus. This is what it is all about. You settle on the concept and then whittle away, playing rule against performance and vice-versa. When the last Rule changes came in earlier this year the rating on my standard Half Tonners, the stock versions, went up O.5ft. We’ve overcome this by shortening the boat up. In theory this should slow the boat down. But by keeping the weight down further and with no increase in displacement, we haven’t lost in performance because lightness is a speed producing factor in itself."

"Now of course you’re into the centreboard scene. Do you see this as a healthy development in offshore racing boats?"

"I do, particularly in the Quarter and Half Ton range where it allows boats to be trailed very simply. If you have a daggerboard rudder too, you can take the boat home and work on it after a race. In terms of performance and rating, the board is a definite if slight development. For a start, having the lead in the hull means you don’t have to rely on a low centre of gravity for stability. But the main advantage we have found is that the boat — I’m talking of Newspaper Taxi — didn’t pitch nearly as much in a seaway as a normal keeler. Then, flat running in light airs, you have the board up and so have less wetted area to hold you back."

‘Thinking back to the down-wind problems they had with Resolute Salmon in the One Ton Cup in Marseilles, have you had any moments of doubt about the board?

"No. I think it must be remembered however that we are really discussing two different types of boat here. Salmon was reasonably small in the stern and unstable in those sections. She also had a masthead rig which would only accentuate her problem. The Taxi, as a comparison, was very firm in the aft sections and she had really good downwind stability."

"You’ve explained how you and Murray Ross got together. What parts does he play in the development of a new one-off like the Bus or the Taxi?

"The rig and sails of course are more or less completely Murray’s department. He developed the rig on Magic Bus and being a sailmaker he can make the sails work with the rig. I think the performance of the boats states how successful he has been. Then, Murray has brought a lot of other ideas — top smallboat thinking — in as well. The injection spinnaker pole system was developed from his Flying Dutchman experience. He is meticulous and imaginative on deck layout too. What we do on the one-offs is really a test bed for the thinking that later goes into the production boats.

"Some people in the United States and Australia feel that Whiting boats are only so successful because Murray and yourself are aboard. The same criticism has been made of Farr boats. What is your view of this?"

"It’s a difficult question, but I think you can compare our situation with top smallboat sailors who go to the Olympics. The best people spend a lot of time working on their boats, setting them up right, sailing them and getting to know everything about them. If we have an edge over other people we compete against, this is that edge. We do our homework, we do a lot of training on the water, we spend a lot of time working on the boat in the marina.

After every race we sit down and work out why something went wrong, discuss it fully and then work to rectify it before we race again. They might only be small faults, a piece of gear or something in the deck layout or gear set-up. But we get it sorted out so that next time it works efficiently.