JEFF SYKES

The founder. The sculler. The boatbuilder who started it all.

Apprenticed in his father's shed

Born in Victoria in 1943, Jeff started his rowing life at age 12 as a coxswain at Corio Bay Rowing Club, beginning a lifelong association that's seen him serve as captain, committee member and Vice President. At 16 he began a five-year apprenticeship under his father Alan Sykes, a part-time racing hull builder. The work was traditional: solid, heavy timber racing boats and general woodworking. By Jeff's own admission, becoming a boatbuilder was an accident rather than a plan.

The 1966 cedar scull

In the early 1960s, Jeff sourced one of the last available 11-inch-wide Queensland red cedar planks in Australia, planed it to 2.5mm, and used it to build a single-skin cedar scull. With six coats of varnish, the boat finished at 12.5 kg, well below the FISA minimum of 14 kg. In that boat, in 1966, he won his first Australian heavyweight singles title. Two years after finishing his apprenticeship, he founded Jeff Sykes & Associates with the express purpose of building lighter, faster racing singles.

A sculler first

Jeff's career has always been built on his success as a world-class sculler. Seven-time Australian sculling champion, five times as a lightweight, twice as a heavyweight. He raced for Victoria at the Interstate Regatta eight times and won the President's Cup in 1966. He represented Australia at the 1973 European Rowing Championships and earned a bronze in the lightweight men's eight at the 1978 FISA Lightweight Championships in Copenhagen. Even into his sixties, he was still racing, winning two gold medals at the 2005 World Masters Regatta. Always in his own boats.

From wood to composites

Between 1966 and 1990, Sykes built around 350 wooden racing singles, joined from the early 1970s by his mentor and design collaborator Derek Barnard. Together they mentored as many as 25 apprentices and boatbuilders. But Jeff also became the first boatbuilder in Australia to commit to composite construction. He sought advice from Klaus Filter, the legendary GDR boatbuilder of FISA fame, who introduced him to Leo Wolloner. Leo travelled to Australia and provided the technical foundation for Sykes' transition into composites. By 1992, Sykes boats were winning Olympic gold medals.

A legacy beyond the boats

Jeff sold the company in 2003 to Jeff Lawrence, but his contribution to the sport hasn't slowed. He served as a board member of Rowing Australia and Chairman of the Rowing Australia Masters Commission. He was inducted into the Victorian Rowing Hall of Fame in 2013, and Rowing Australia awarded him Life Membership in 2022. In 2022, the Geelong rowing community opened the Jeff Sykes Rowing Centre on the Barwon River, a $1.5 million community facility named in his honour, providing school students from across the Geelong region a place to learn the sport.

"As a young man I listened respectfully to the old scullers from Sydney who told me 'you haven't rowed a good boat until you row a brand-new single-skin cedar boat.' They had my attention, so I decided I would test their statement, but little did I know that it would take me another three decades to discover the truth."

Across 35 years of building and rowing racing singles, Jeff worked through every material and method, single-skin cedar, plywood, fibreglass, sandwich construction, honeycomb cores. The lesson, distilled from countless conversations with rowers around the world, was simple: the stiffer the hull, the faster the boat.

"What separated the winners from the second best turned out to be very simple. The thing that all the winning boats had in common was a very hard and stiff hull surface that had little or no deflection when loaded with crew weight. Boats with hard hulls did not sink as low in the water, and therefore rode higher on their lines with less wetted surface."