Interview with Nigel Grogan, Managing Director of Hyde Sails
by Mark Jardine 7 Sep 2016 14:09 BST
7 September 2016
Nigel and Jack Grogan win the Squib nationals at Weymouth © Mike Rice
We spoke to Nigel Grogan, Managing Director of Hyde Sails, who has recently won the Squib National Championship for the first time and also won White Group at Cowes Week.
Mark: First of all, could you tell me a bit about your Squib Nationals win?
Nigel: It was a really satisfying example of a game plan that came together. Squib sailing is incredibly close, for example, in one race, we were second by four seconds after two hours of racing, and, like most keelboat sailing, it's all about the tactics. You've got to be going at the right speed, but the boat speed differences are minute. It's getting off the start line and having a game plan and getting the right side of everything that makes all the difference.
We deliberately adopted a fairly conservative approach. We've come close to winning the Nationals on four or five occasions before, and we really felt we had to do something slightly different to win it. Primarily, that was a game plan that, for Weymouth, was coming off towards the favoured end of the line, but never actually trying to be pole position at either end, and then sticking pretty much to the middle of the track, rather than banging the corners. We were never round the windward mark in the top three, in fact we were nearly always around the windward mark in about eighth to early teens, but we were confident enough in our pace and the rest of our sailing that we could crawl our way through to decent positions.
So we didn't actually win a race, but we were never outside the top five, so we won with a day to spare. It was surprisingly easy under the circumstances.
Mark: So taking a conservative approach to your sailing?
Nigel: It was, but a very Squib-specific conservative approach. Starting is so much of Squib racing - if you can pop out of the front rank and hold a lane, you're almost guaranteed to be in the top ten at the windward mark. But the risk of not quite making it, and then being completely buried, is just a hairsbreadth when you pull the trigger. The other difficulty at Weymouth is that often you've got no transit or a poor transit, and with a line that's 500 metres long, if you're at the end you can gauge where you are better, but if you're in the middle, it's really difficult to actually establish whether there is any line sag, or even a bulge. So it's an art to get off the middle of the line in good shape.
Mark: You have a long history in the Squib class. How many attempts have you had at the Nationals and what was your previous best result?
Nigel: It's horrifying, but I think I started racing Squibs about 26 years ago, and I've had Squibs on and off, with big gaps in between, but I think we've done more than our fair share of championships and we've finished in every position in the top ten apart from first at previous events. We've come so close on several occasions and it seems like a very long journey.
Mark: You came into the marine industry after you started sailing, and from the car industry as a background, so could you tell me a bit about what you did previous to running Hyde Sails?
Nigel: I was a law graduate and was going to be a solicitor, but I couldn't get a grant to do the next bit, so I went and got a job with the Mars organization which gave me a fantastic schooling in management and sales. I then decided that I was interested in two things; boats and cars, and there was no money in boats, so I joined the car industry and ended up having a chain of Volkswagen and Audi dealerships.
I was fortunate enough to then sell them and drive up and down on my lawn tractor for a couple of years wondering what to do, until my old bank manager phoned me up and said, "Are you interested in doing something with boats?" and I replied, "Well, I might be". He said, "Well, I've got this business that the owner is looking for an exit; it's in sail making, and would you be interested?" And funnily enough I said, "Well, I would be if it was Hyde", which it was, so I met up with Edward Hyde. We agreed that I would effectively work with him as a consultant for a couple of years while he decided whether he wanted to sell it to me and I decided whether I wanted to buy it, and we eventually did a deal.
Mark: So, a transition with you becoming the owner of Hyde Sails over a couple of years?
Nigel: Yes, it was a fairly long process as Edward had established a successful business over a very long period of time; of course started originally with Keith Musto. It's a challenging market place and a very challenging industry, completely dominated by North with the rest of us in some respects scrabbling around for the crumbs off the edge of the table.
Mark: You have a broad range of classes and types of boats that you make sails for. Where are the main markets for Hyde?
Nigel: Our business model is very broad. We have a big network of worldwide distributors that sell retail sails in every sector of the market and we simply supply them and they're usually badged with the H (Hyde Sails) logo. We have an increasing network of own label customers as well so we actually make sails internationally for a very wide range of well-known brands.
We also supply many thousands of sails to boat builders, from small dinghies and keelboats to multihulls and cruising yachts. We have a large market in cruising yacht sails worldwide and then we have our one-design section that concentrates on racing, where we're active in anything from Optimists up to Clipper Round the World Race yachts, and from international classes, like the 505, down to small keelboats, like the Squib.
Mark: How do you find your business experience in areas outside the marine industry helps with sail making?
Nigel: I think that working for companies like Mars and in the car industry teaches you a lot of disciplines, and you approach sail making just in the same way that you would any other business. It's about people, it's about products, it's about placement and it's about the numbers. The actual sails are the medium that you're dealing with, but it's the business disciplines that are the important thing. So, I don't approach it as a sail maker at all - I'm not a sail maker - I'm a businessman first, but a businessman that's involved in sail making.
Mark: What do you enjoy about competing at Cowes Week?
Nigel: The atmosphere's great. The challenge of the tactical calls - racing around the Solent - is so different from windward-leewards or triangles. It just adds a whole different dynamic to it. The navigation is a hard problem - in a hiking keelboat like a Squib, you don't have enough hands to sit and pore over a map or study the GPS - we don't have that, so it's all eyeball and it means that there's a high workload. You're very busy trying to find your way around and concentrating on sailing the thing. But the event has an unrivalled atmosphere, and the buzz of starting on the Royal Yacht Squadron line with the ripping tide and thirty-odd boats around you... well, until you're OCS... it's great.
Mark: Hyde Sails have a number of sailors who are involved in different classes of boats and sail those boats regularly, what do you see as the importance to that?
Nigel: We've got Dave Hall, who's very well-known and has just been out to the Fireball Europeans, Richard Lovering, who's our sail designer and a brilliant sailor, who's just been doing the 505 Worlds at Weymouth, Luke Yeates who has been sailing the Quarter Tonner with some of the rest of the team including Mark Wilkinson who has done several America's Cup campaigns. The importance is that most successful sail-making companies, their DNA comes from racing, and it's the halo effect: if you're good on the race course, people make the connection that your sails must be good.
Equally, the guy that races his 505 today, or people like your father (Stuart Jardine), they've got experience in one-design classes and the next thing they're racing at Cowes Classic Week. The guy that's racing a 505 today, Neil Fulcher for example, who's just bought a 45 foot Hanse to go cruising in, what's the first thing that he does? He calls us up and says, "Can you make us some sails for it?" So we hope very much that people move up the size range and they take their racing experiences and perception of the brand with them.
Mark: Nigel, thank you very much for your time. It's been great speaking to you.
Nigel: A pleasure. Thanks, Mark.
www.hydesails.co.uk