Letter from Mark Foy to the Medway Yacht Club

During lengthy business trips to England, Foy boasted to one and all about the great speed and sail of Sydney’s big open boats. When his brother-in-law shipped the old champion 22-footer Irex to him in England in 1898, Foy issued a challenge.

William Wyllie, Commodore of the Medway Yacht Club, accepted and built a new boat of the same waterline length as Irex, named Maid of Kent. They were to compete for the Anglo-Australian Challenge shield.

Wyllie’s new, lighter, skimming-dish style boat carried half the sail of Irex. It was skippered by Wyllie’s wife Marion, an experienced sailor, against Foy and his crew of 16 Australian expats in England.

In a five-match series on the tidal Medway River, Marion Wyllie soundly beat Foy in every race.
He was clearly outclassed.

Foy, who relentlessly petitioned the Medway Yacht Club for a rematch for nearly a decade, finally claimed the shield in 1911.

Mark Foy was writing to the Honorary Secretary of Medway Yacht Club asking the committee to alter their rules to allow competition on open water where "...the elements of sailing and not the tideways decide the contest", rather than on the Medway.

The refusal of the committee to do so would mean "...you may on the greatest of certainties & with very little honour attached to it claim to have defeated us on the medway for all time as I am perfectly certain you will never again get a challenge to race".