[2] The desire to race these faster skiffs using Aberdare's innovations led J. J. Giltinan to found the New South Wales 18-Footers League in 1935 as a rival club to the Flying Squadron.
A local newspaper reported on the day following the first race: "The crowd at Circular Quay (ferry wharf) was so large that extra steamer accommodation had to be provided at the last moment, while craft of almost every conceivable description were in attendance.
Due to the bad feelings which had resulted from the 1939 regatta, the League was determined to send the strongest team possible and recruited the great Billo Hayward to sail its top boat Crows Nest.
New Zealand's Jack Logan believed he would never beat the Australians in his boat, so began to browse through old plans of his late father, who was a master designer and builder.
New Zealand's domination resulted from the team's use of new cold-moulded hulls with two and three skins of diagonally laid planking and the fact that they carried three of the five crew on the trapeze wire.
There were great dramas even before the racing began when Bob Miller (later famously known as Ben Lexcen) arrived with his radically designed Taipan, which was the biggest break in tradition since the skimmer.
Despite the problems experienced by Miller at Auckland, there was little doubt about Taipan's design, and the follow-up Venom proved this emphatically by dominating the 1961 contest on the Brisbane River.
At the 1963 contest in Auckland, the 1958 champion Len Heffernan played an unusual role when he was responsible for the design and construction of Ken Beashel's winning skiff, Schemer.
The 1969 series on the Brisbane River produced the championship's first tie which required a sail-off between two Australian boats Travelodge (Bob Holmes) and Rod Zemanek's Willie B.
Bob Holmes and his Travelodge team returned to their consistent best to take out title number four at Auckland in 1971 but the writing was on the wall that the Bruce Farr design was starting to become a real force in 18 ft skiff racing and New Zealand were about to make a comeback.
In complete contrast to the previous series, the 1973 regatta in Sydney was so wide open that it wasn't decided until the spinnaker run home in the final race.
An unfortunate sidelight to this contest was the news that Roger Welsh, who had shown such ability during previous challenges, was suffering from an incurable disease and was near death as this regatta was being sailed.
After being runner-up in the previous two Giltinan Championship contests, Dave Porter finally won the title when he successfully steered KB to victory in the 1975 series on the Brisbane River.
The sail handling by Porter and his crew, particularly on the long tacking downwind runs, was the winning factor and thrilled the large spectator following on the water and river banks.
The Giltinan Championship was continuing to gain more international appeal as another nation was represented for the first time in this regatta when French designer-builder Eric Lerouge skippered a locally chartered skiff.
Murray cut the sides and bow and changed the shape before shipping her off to New Zealand where he won the 1977 Giltinan Championship with an incredible final race win.
Third place overall went to New Zealand's Russell Bowler, sailing a revolutionary foam-sandwich constructed Benson & Hedges, which was one-third lighter and had a comparatively smaller wetted surface area than other designs.
For the next five years (1978–1982, inclusive) Iain Murray, Andrew Buckland and Don Buckley were unbeatable in the Giltinan Championship despite the competition of some of the sport's greatest-ever skippers, and were also responsible for the design, construction and rigging of many of their opponents.
The likes of Trevor Barnabas, John Winning, Dave Porter, Peter Sorensen and Rob Brown tried in vain to unseat the master but the Color 7 team was magnificent as they re-wrote the history books - giving Murray his still unequalled six championship victories.
Peter Sorensen, however, soon dispelled this theory when he skippered Tia Maria to five wins in the seven-race regatta at Auckland, then retained the crown the following year on Sydney Harbour (although this victory was much more hard fought).
They also determined that it was an official's error in not detecting the problem prior to the regatta and consequently declared Barnabas (Chesty Bond) and Brown (Southern Cross) as joint champions.
His skiff, AAMI, was built and rigged by Bethwaite for half the cost of the previous style boats and totally dominated the racing as she showed blistering speed across most wind ranges.
It was in strict contrast for Stephen Quigley's AEI-Pace Express in 1996, which had to recover from a poor start in the last race to win the championship after an extremely close series.
For the first time since the inception of the event in 1938, a boat from the northern hemisphere won the championship when UK skipper Tim Robinson took a closely fought 1999 regatta in Rockport.
Howie Hamlin became the second northern hemisphere and first US skipper to win the Giltinan Championship when he led an all-US team to victory on board General Electric-US Challenge in 2002.
Unfortunately for Greenhalgh, RMW was on the wrong side of a wind shift and was passed by two competitors on the last beat and finished sixth, while Hamlin brought GE/US home in second place behind Tony Hannan's Total Recall.
While the northern hemisphere run of consecutive victories was extended to three in 2004, the result was totally unlike the previous two regattas when the UK champion Rob Greenhalgh (RMW Marine) was dominant with four race wins and two second placings.
Michael Coxon took the title in 2006 (Casio Seapathfinder), then defended it successfully in 2007 (Fiat) while young Seve Jarvin won impressively with Gotta Love It 7 in 2008.
The 2010 and 2011 championships produced similar results with Seve Jarvin's Gotta Love It 7 defeating Michael Coxon's Thurlow Fisher Lawyers in each series.
[5] Gotta Love It 7, skippered by Seve Jarvin (AUS) and crewed by Scott Babbage and Peter Harris, won the trophy in a dramatic race 7 on Feb 24, 2013.