Fatal Storm (6 page)

There are numerous impressive statistics associated with the Sydney to Hobart. Prior to the 1998 event, a total of 4230 yachts had faced the starter and they had carried more than 35,000 competitors. Considering the extreme dangers, it was remarkable that only two sailors had died as a result of injuries suffered aboard their respective boats. Incredibly no one had been lost overboard and not recovered – a fact that many saw as evidence of solid safety procedures and rigid race organisation – plus an occasional dose of good fortune.

The most remarkable stories of survival came out of the 1993 event – one of the toughest on record before
the 1998 race. A southerly gale with winds gusting up to 50 knots and a fast-flowing opposing current combined to whip up mountainous waves off the NSW south coast. Conditions were so severe that of the 104 yachts that started, only 38 finished.

Around midnight on the second night a huge breaking wave overwhelmed the 35-foot sloop
MEM.
The yacht capsized and owner–skipper John Quinn was hurled into the sea after the sheer force of the broken water caused his safety harness to break. Quinn surfaced and was faced with the horror of seeing his yacht sailing away. The crew knew he was overboard and were desperately searching, but they could not see him. Other race yachts and ships rushed to the area to search but Quinn was rated as having very little chance of surviving in the horrendous conditions. Every 15 minutes or so a colossal breaking wave more than 40-feet high would sweep through the area, so powerful that it would hurl a man around like a soggy rag doll. After four unsuccessful hours of searching, the worst was feared. Race officials discussed writing his obituary. They were unaware Quinn, aided by a light buoyancy vest, was still alive and was duck-diving under each immense breaking wave.

“The only time I really started to get a bit desperate was right at the end and that was for a very short period of time,” Quinn said. “At that stage the buoyancy vest I was wearing was losing some of its buoyancy and I was starting to take water and get tired. A while later, as I rode to the top of one big wave, I saw it – the most beautiful Christmas tree you have ever seen. It was a bloody big ship with all lights blazing coming ever so slowly towards me. At one moment I thought the ship was going to pass without anyone spotting me because it was coming down the drift at an angle and the stern, where all the lookouts were gathered on the bridge and
using searchlights, was the most distant point from me. My heart began to sink.

“Then a big wave picked up the stern and knocked it sideways towards where I was. Suddenly the ship was right there, just metres away. I started to yell my lungs out ‘Hey, hey, hey!’ I shouted. Brent Shaw, who was manning a searchlight, first heard my yells then spotted me. He was fantastic. After hearing me shout he got the searchlight on me and started to shout out ‘I’ve got you. I can see you.’”

While the searchlight was trained on Quinn, the race yacht
Atara
, which was just astern and damaged but still searching, moved in to drag him aboard. It had been five freezing hours since he’d fallen overboard. He was 50 miles offshore.

There was a wry link between this incident and the very first Sydney to Hobart. John Quinn’s father Harry had bought
Rani
from Captain Illingworth soon after it won the first race and in 1959 he had taken John and two family friends on a fishing trip to Port Stephens, north of Sydney. A storm moved in so they anchored
Rani
off the deserted Broughton Island and went ashore to spend the night in an old fisherman’s hut. Battered by the fierce waves,
Rani
dragged its anchor that night and was wrecked on a coastal beach a few miles away. With no sign of survivors an aerial search was mounted and eventually the four were spotted on Broughton Island, but with conditions so severe, they had to wait four days to be rescued by a boat.

The 1993 Quinn incident brought yet another review of race safety standards and search and rescue operations. Yet again it was the Hobart race that would lead the world towards new standards.

Former Sydney to Hobart race director, Gordon Marshall, told of one big change that the Hobart race
brought to international yacht design: “We heard alarm bells in the early to mid-seventies when the lightweight, skiff-type yachts arrived on the scene. In one race only one of six of these lightweights reached Hobart. It was apparent they couldn’t handle rough conditions. In fact they were dangerous because they carried the minimum amount of ballast and the maximum amount of crew weight to keep them upright. The yachts were also extremely wide so the crew could sit out on the side and have their weight contribute towards keeping the yacht as level as possible. At one stage the hulls were becoming so wide and the keels so small they probably would have stayed upside down had they capsized.

“We had no option but to introduce stability factors into race rules. Yachts had to prove they were stable and self-righting before being allowed to compete. It was one rule that went on to become universally accepted around the world and in turn ocean racing became safer.”

Even in the early 1990s some people did not like the trend they were seeing in the design of yachts. In December 1990 the late Alan Payne – a legendary Australian yacht designer – had his thoughts printed in a story in
The Weekend Australian.
“Bad weather could turn Sydney–Hobart into a racing catastrophe. Modern yachts not safe in heavy seas.” He referred ominously to “the 100-year storm”.

“I’m not talking about the blows they normally experience in a race where the wind gets up for a few hours then abates and everyone gets to Hobart and says how tough it was,” Payne said. “I’m talking about the extreme conditions where huge seas break. These waves can really happen in the worst conditions on these race courses [he was referring to the Melbourne to Hobart and Melbourne to Devonport races]. These are the conditions where the yachts will fail structurally, where
they will be capsized and where rigs break. The problems are that they aren’t strong enough, or in the event of a capsize are so stable in the inverted position that they don’t want to come upright.”

Eight years later, in the 1998 race, much of what Payne predicted
could
happen
did
happen. His theories were based on considerable research into what sea conditions would be developed by a 35-knot gale in Bass Strait over a 24-hour period. He said that it was inevitable in those conditions that every yacht would see a wave of at least 33 foot (10 metres) in height on the 150-mile fetch from Gabo Island, off the mainland, across to Flinders Island, off Tasmania’s north-east corner. In fact many of the 1998 Hobart fleet saw winds of around 70 knots – twice as strong as those on which Payne based his predictions. His calculations suggested three yachts would completely disappear, taking 22 people with them; six crew would be lost overboard; three liferafts containing 12 people would never be found and a rescue helicopter would crash while on a mission.

It was apparent after the 1998 race that if it hadn’t been for the herculean rescue effort and the fact that much of the drama occurred in relatively close proximity to the south-east corner of the Australian mainland, Alan Payne’s predictions could well have come true. While generally accepting his comments, ocean racing authorities have always been quick to stress that the standards covering design, construction, communications and safety equipment are among the most stringent in the world.

In the early days of racing to Hobart the oft-heard comment was “wooden yachts and iron men”. Today, many of the sailors who manned those heavily timbered craft look at the modern yachts made of fibreglass and
space age materials and mumble “plastic yachts and plastic men”. One of the greatest sailors to come out of the Hobart race, Magnus Halvorsen (who with brother Trygve won three consecutive races aboard
Freya
between 1963–65), refers to contemporary offshore yachts as “cocktail shakers”.

But modern ocean racing yachts represent the very latest in design technology, materials and equipment. Instead of starting life as a series of pencil sketches, drawings and half models that are eyeballed by the builder, the yachts more often than not germinate within the “mind” of a powerful computer. Working within basic parameters determined by the owner (primarily length and budget), the designer and his team begin formulating a shape based on the limitations of the handicapping rule and the optimum performance attainable for a yacht of the desired size. The general rule of thumb is that the greater the waterline length of the yacht and the larger the sail area, the faster the boat will be. Hull shapes are usually analysed by a computer then tank-tested before a decision on the final shape is made.

Engineers must design the structure using proven laminate information and calculations which are generated by a computer that tests the loads on the hull, deck, keel and rudder. Apart from fibreglass, other exotic materials such as carbon fibre, Kevlar and honeycomb or foam cores are used. Often the hulls are baked in a huge oven to achieve maximum strength.

Indeed the technology and techniques used are not that far away from those employed in spacecraft construction. Almost the entire vessel, from hull to rig to sails, is handcrafted, a painstaking process that can take up to six months. Because of the intricate nature of the construction, the yachts are extremely vulnerable if not built to precise specifications. Modifications which disrespect the very
nature of a one-piece structure – a monocoque – are usually catastrophic. This type of structure is literally only as strong as its weakest part, a principle which was clearly illustrated in the 1988 race.

Rod Muir’s new spare-no-expense, space-age maxi
Windward Passage II
was deemed to have a mortgage on line honours and probably the course record. Approaching Bass Strait the yacht was doing everything expected of it – leading the fleet and bettering the record pace set by
Kialoa
in 1975. But Mother Nature threw a spanner in the works in the form of a howling sou’westerly gale. Initially the
Windward Passage II
crew answered the challenge of the rising seas and howling winds and kept the race record in their sights. Without warning, in the middle of the night, the entire crew heard a sickening crack. A quick check found an ugly split had developed across the deck near the cockpit which, if the yacht had continued in the race, could have expanded and led to total structural failure.

In an instant
Windward Passage II
had gone from brilliant to busted. It turned out someone had cut a small hole in the deck laminate to accommodate a compass, hadn’t reinforced the area and thus the structural integrity of the hull had been compromised. As one crewmember put it, if
Windward Passage II
had continued in the race there was a chance “the back half of the boat would have fallen off”.

Compare that incident with
Rani
’s problems in the first race. Its crew stuffed a blanket into a gap in the planks to slow a leak so they could continue!

Improvements in design, construction and materials have seen a steady increase in the speeds at which the yachts travel. Interestingly, it took 21 years for the record set by the now vintage American maxi ketch
Kialoa
in 1975 – where she took just two days,
14 hours, 36 minutes and 56 seconds – to be bettered. In 1996 the German giant,
Morning Glory
, owned by Hasso Plattner, scraped a mere 30 minutes off the record.
Kialoa
and the rest of the fleet had a dream run in 1975. Spinnakers were set as soon as they cleared the Sydney heads and from there on it was smooth sailing all the way down to Hobart. Such ideal conditions are rarely encountered.

A telling comparison can be drawn between the first race in 1945 and the gale-lashed 1993 event where only 38 of the 102 starters finished. The 1993 fleet struggled against headwinds and mountainous seas all the way south in what was considered a slow race. Of the 1945 fleet only the fastest yacht,
Rani
, had an elapsed time which would have positioned her before the slowest yachts in 1993 – she would have crossed the line 34th. Compared to the 1992 race
Rani
would have finished one and a half days behind the slowest yacht.

International media interest in the Sydney to Hobart race has always ensured it receives prominent publicity. At the same time, Australia’s general media – television, newspapers and radio – have elevated the event to the status of prime-time, compulsory Boxing Day entertainment. Its start is the subject of a two-hour national live television coverage; it is always front page and headline news; and hundreds of thousands of spectators either watch from home, headlands and beaches on the harbour shores or cram the omnipresent and colourful flotilla of boats that gather to farewell the fleet.

The media’s enthusiasm for procuring first-hand and exclusive information from the fleet stretches back to the
earliest races. There have been many industrious, almost ingenious efforts, to get “the scoop”, and none more so than that hatched by the Sydney
Sun
newspaper’s yachting writer, Lou D’Alpuget (father of writer Blanche), and the then young journalist Frank McNulty back in 1947.

D’Alpuget wanted an exclusive and he saw McNulty, who was crewing on the yacht
Moonbi
, as his source. D’Alpuget didn’t want to use radio communications because they were then subject to consumption by anyone who was listening. So, when
Moonbi
set sail on Boxing Day that year, it had on board three additional guests – homing pigeons! After two days at sea McNulty did as planned. He pencilled onto cigarette papers a report on the yacht’s progress and attached them to the legs of the birds.

“I took the pigeons onto the deck and released them, but they refused to leave,” he said. “I think they were seasick. I held them up and they just fluttered back to the deck. Eventually I took a bird in my cupped hands and began swinging it towards the sky. After a few swings I let the bird go and sure enough it flapped off towards the coast.”

D’Alpuget got his scoop.