The Proving Ground: The Inside Story of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Boat Race

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Managing the crew of a racing vessel can be complicated. There needs to be a clear line of authority, but decisions must be made fluidly, based on a foundation of mutual understanding about strengths and weaknesses, methods that work and ones that don’t, a common vocabulary as well as unspoken conventions for coordinating complicated procedures in sometimes challenging conditions. There’s too much going on during a race for the skipper to make all the decisions, and no one person can be the expert on everything. In addition, some of the most important calls—which course to take, what sails to fly—can’t be made with scientific certainty. Despite an increased reliance on high tech, most decisions in sailing are still made by human beings. The key to a successful boat is a crew’s ability to express opinions freely, without worrying about potential insults or hurt feelings, and to reach consensus rapidly.

When, late in the game, Kooky recruited Kulmar and Glyn, he was more focused on the individual skills they would bring than on the effect they would have on the rest of the crew. After months of racing as a group, the original crewmen had gotten to know one another and had become comfortable working together. The addition of Kulmar and Glyn changed things.

Dags, who had sailed with Kulmar in the past, had done everything he could to highlight the downside of bringing him on board. “He’s a fantastic helmsman, but he thinks he’s more than that—he thinks he’s a god,” Dags told Kooky. “When he steps on the boat, he’s going to act like he owns it.”

That had a ring of truth to Kooky. When Kooky and Kulmar met at a pub to talk about sailing the Sword, Kulmar was half an hour late. He then enumerated his sailing accomplishments, doing so in such elaborate detail that Kooky had little time to talk about the Sword’s existing crew. Indeed, Kulmar’s tendency to play up his victories had made him unpopular in many yachting circles, where understatement and modesty is the expected norm, but Kooky, who thought his crew was short of top-notch helmsmen, pursued him anyway. For his part, Kulmar left the pub convinced that Kooky was committed to winning the Hobart, but not experienced enough to know how. Rather than viewing that combination as a negative, Kulmar thought it would enable him to run the boat without having to bear the expense of owning it.

The potential for tension between Kulmar and the rest of the crew became apparent even before the Sword left the dock. Kulmar said the crew should adopt a two-watch system in which half the crew was on duty at any time. The others had already agreed to a three-watch system in which one team would sail the boat while the second was on call, relaxing either on deck or below, and the third was free to climb into their bunks and sleep. In a two-watch system, half the crew would be on deck, changing and trimming the sails. The other half would be completely off-duty at any given time. With a three-watch system, it would be easier to push the boat harder, but the crew would get less rest.

“I’ve never done a Hobart with a three-watch system,” Kulmar said. “It’s just not required.”

“No,” said Carl Watson, a balding, forty-five-year-old yachting industry consultant who had been sailing on the Sword for close to a year, “we’ve already decided on three watches.”

Watson was another crewman who had warned Kooky against adding Kulmar and Glyn. He realized that the Sword could use two first-class drivers, but he didn’t like the idea of adding anyone—whether it was Kulmar or an Olympian—to the crew at the last minute. “Glyn might be a fantastic helmsman,” Watson said to Kooky a few days before the race, “but it’s a late call. He doesn’t know anything about the boat—he’s never been on it—and we haven’t even met him.”

Standing on the dock, angry that Kulmar was trying to impose changes, Watson refused to give any ground. “We’re having three watches. There’s a good chance we’re going to get some bad weather, so we need to have more of the crew on duty.”

A little later, Kulmar and Watson had another disagreement. “What’s this?” Kulmar asked, pointing to a large bag that obviously contained a spare mainsail. “We don’t want to take two mains. It’s nothing but extra weight.”

“Yes, we do,” Watson said. “We’re taking it. We’ve already made the decision.”

“This is bullshit,” Kulmar thundered. “It weighs far too much. It’s stupid. I’ve done more Hobarts than anyone on this boat—and it doesn’t make any fucking sense to take two mains.”

“I’ve done exactly the same number of Hobarts as you,” Watson said. “Seventeen.”

“I’ve won more.”

Watson wasn’t about to back down. Like Dags, he thought Kulmar was mounting a one-man takeover, and thought the only way to stop him was to confront him at every turn. “Your job is to steer the boat,” Watson said. “Nothing else. You’re not the skipper.”

Yachting is full of hard-charging men who are used to having their own way. On many yachts, crewmen regularly scream at one another, and it sometimes seems as if tensions will boil over into ugly confrontations; the harsh words, however, are usually deceptive. The shouting and cursing is typically about small things—the need to raise a sail faster or clean up a mess in the galley—and the outbursts are quickly forgotten. Watson, whose main role on the Sword was to trim the mainsail, wasn’t surprised by Kulmar’s aggressive behavior, but that didn’t make him any less angry as he walked down the dock. Kulmar’s attempt to assume control was a serious matter, and Kooky was the only person who could resolve it.

After hearing from Watson, Kooky agreed to tell Kulmar that they were going to carry two mainsails, but Kooky was unable to decide what to do about what Watson said next: “You have to tell Kulmar that he’s not the skipper, that he’s not going to be making the decisions—or we’re going to have a real problem.”

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WITH A TATTERED chino wardrobe, a gray beard, and a pipe hanging from his mouth, Richard Winning, the owner of the Winston Churchill, looked as if he were from another age. In fact, he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the modern world. Rather than buy a sleek new racing yacht, he had chosen to spend a quarter of a million dollars rebuilding the Churchill, which was constructed in Hobart out of Huon pine in 1942. Winning, who was forty-eight, was a child when he first saw the boat, and it was love at first sight. When the yacht came up for sale two years before the 1998 Hobart, he jumped at the chance to become its owner.

A classic yacht with a teak deck, brass fittings, and an oyster white hull, the Winston Churchill was one of the best-known yachts in Australia. It was among the nine boats that had competed in the first Hobart, and since then it had sailed in fifteen others, twice circumnavigated the world, and become an icon for a bygone era of graceful wood-hulled sailing yachts.

Life had been good to its owner. Winning ran part of the retailing company his great-grandfather had founded in 1906. It adhered to principles that seemed almost quaint, refusing to borrow money or to spend much on advertising, but business was booming. Winning, however, found little enduring satisfaction in financial success. He had the gnawing sense that he was part of a generation that has never faced the kind of challenges that men should. “All blokes want to be tested,” he liked to say. “We’ve had it too easy.”

For him, racing a distinguished old yacht with a crew that included several of his oldest friends was more than a sporting event or an escape from everyday life. It was a chance to reenter the natural world, to be a part of a great undertaking, and to do battle with a force that was bigger than any man. It was also a test in which things he considered genuine—seamanship, old-fashioned workmanship, and camaraderie—determined success. In a time when the most celebrated achievements involved technology and stock prices, Winning was more drawn to the sea than ever, in part because it still presented the same challenges it did when the Churchill was launched. Winning’s crew shared his way of thinking. John Stanley was its most important member. Stanley had sailed fifteen Hobarts in his fifty-one years and was, like the Churchill, something of a legend. He had been called Steamer ever since a childhood friend said he had as much energy as a steam-powered Stanley Steamer motorcar.

Steamer started sailing dinghies when he was eleven, and the sea had held an unshakable allure ever since. He had competed in many of the world’s great long-distance yacht races. In 1980 he crewed in the America’s Cup for Alan Bond, the Australian rogue who won it three years later, ending the New York Yacht Club’s 132-year reign and what had been the longest winning streak in any sport. In 1998, Steamer was working for Winning as a foreman in a boatyard Winning owned, although on the water their roles reversed: there, it was often Steamer who made the decisions.

Over the previous few years, both of Steamer’s hips had been replaced, and he walked with the hobble of a mechanical duck. In the months before the race, one of his kidneys was removed after it was found to contain a cancerous tumor, a large melanoma was cut away from his right forearm, and asbestosis was discovered in one of his lungs. But Steamer wasn’t about to let any of that get in the way of racing. He simply had to sail. Even in appearance he seemed destined for the water. With his broad mustache, sizable jowls, and barrel-shaped chest, he looked like a walrus.

As much as anything, Steamer loved sailing’s history and traditions. Sometimes, after he had had a few beers, he would tell his friends that he thought modern society valued the wrong things, that there weren’t enough people interested in learning how to make things or in developing the kind of seamanship that’s required for long-distance ocean racing. “All the races are getting shorter. No one has the time.” One of the things Steamer liked most about long-distance sailing was how a group of men from every imaginable background, living and working together in close quarters, got to know one another in a way that just didn’t happen in normal life. “Whether you’re rich or poor doesn’t make any difference when you’re on the water,” he would say.

One of the Churchill’s crewmen, Michael Bannister, drove a one-man garbage truck for a living. As a teenager, Bannister told friends that he was going to join the marine police or work on a ferry after he finished school. A high-school guidance counselor talked him out of those ideas, but when he was drafted to serve in Vietnam and an application asked what part of the army he would like to serve in, he wrote, “Small ships, small ships, small ships.” He ended up working on an ammunition supply vessel, and upon returning to Australia, he worked as a department-store salesman for a while, then began driving various kinds of trucks. When he wasn’t on the road, he was on the water.

Bannister met his wife, Shirley, at a post-regatta party at the CYC. She didn’t care about his modest professional life, and she learned to live with the fact that Bannister spent at least one day of every weekend sailing. When their only child, Stephen, was younger, Bannister took him along. Stephen was born three days apart from fellow crewman John Dean’s son, Nathan, and the two boys spent countless weekends playing on the beach while their fathers raced. Bannister and his son were extremely close; when Stephen was older, the two of them sailed together competitively.

Bannister had been looking forward to the Hobart for months, and he couldn’t wait to get started.

Just before 9:00 A.M. Saturday morning, Geoffrey Bascombe was swimming past the Winston Churchill, which was tied to a dock just outside the CYC clubhouse. Like its owner, the Churchill looked out of place and time.

Bascombe, with an enormous body, bulbous nose, and a two-foot-long beard, presented an altogether different image. He hadn’t weighed himself in more than a decade but knew he was somewhere over three hundred pounds, the reason his friends called him Mega. A former navy sailor who made his living taking care of boats, he had just finished scrubbing the bottoms of four yachts to ensure that they were free of speed-hindering grime. Now that the work was done, he stopped paddling so he could admire the Churchill, which he had seen many times before but always from greater distances.

Mega’s eyes were drawn to an area of the port side near the bow, where he saw a vertical dark line. It was about a foot long and ended just above the waterline. Swimming closer, he was shocked to see what looked like a serious flaw on a yacht that obviously had been meticulously maintained. It looked as if some of the caulking, which is supposed to fill the spaces between planks to make a wooden boat watertight, was missing. The gap was about as wide as the width of a pencil, and when Mega peered inside, he saw what appeared to be a black rubbery compound.

As soon as he emerged from the water, Mega walked toward the Churchill’s dock, anxious to tell its crew about what he had seen. He knew missing caulking could be the result of shifting planks. With wooden boats, some movement is inevitable, but too much can be catastrophic because it could spring a plank. Mega spoke to two men whom he assumed were members of its crew. “There’s some caulking missing,” he told them. “You should make sure the owner knows about it.”

Richard Winning had been the first member of his crew to arrive at the CYC, but he heard nothing about what Mega Bascombe had seen.

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LARRY ELLISON TOOK Sayonara’s wheel twenty minutes before the start—and disaster struck almost immediately. Four grinders, the muscular crewmen who cranked two bicycle pedal – like contraptions with their arms to provide the force needed to pull in the huge sails, realized it first. When Tony Rae, who was responsible for trimming the mainsail, wanted to let out the sail, he eased the line by letting it slip around the drum of a winch. When he wanted to pull the sail in, he needed help from the grinders, who worked the pedals, two to a station. The men and handles sometimes moved so rapidly that they looked as if they had become a single machine. But now, as they turned the pedals, which turned the winch drum by way of a driveshaft, the grinders heard something they shouldn’t have: a terrible crunching sound. Suddenly the pedals started to turn freely, obviously disengaged. In just twelve knots of wind, the driveshaft, which was made from carbon fiber, had shattered.

Ellison didn’t know what had happened, but he knew he had to continue focusing on steering, particularly when Dickson left his side to investigate the problem. Although Ellison didn’t show any reaction, he was worried. Things are breaking before we even get started, he said to himself. That’s a bad omen.

As soon as Dickson figured out what had happened, he reacted with the kind of blistering fury for which he was famous. “This is ridiculous and inexcusable!” he boomed. “This can’t happen! Our system has failed!” Though things break regularly on most boats, Dickson considered equipment failure on Sayonara unforgivable, except in the most extreme weather conditions. Old or new, everything was supposed to be repeatedly tested and inspected. If something broke in a relatively light wind, someone hadn’t done his job.

When Sayonara had been shipped to Sydney, it was accompanied by two forty-foot-long cargo containers. One was outfitted as an office and a well-equipped workshop, crammed full of tools and spare parts. The other carried the twenty-four-foot chase boat along with other gear. Shouting into a cellular phone, Dickson ordered the driver of the chase boat to rocket back to its on-land base station to fetch a replacement driveshaft. Powered by two ninety-horsepower outboard engines, the chase boat could travel at forty-five knots, but—Dickson belatedly realized—that wouldn’t be fast enough to get to the workshop and back to Sayonara before the ten-minute warning gun at 12:50 P.M., at which point off-yacht support was prohibited. Without the driveshaft, one of Sayonara’s three main winches would be useless. The crew would be forced to rely on a less powerful and awkwardly located winch in the pit of the cockpit, making it more difficult for Tony Rae to see the sail and control its trim.

Returning to his position near Ellison, Dickson told him, “We’ll have to trim the mainsail from the middle winch. You’re going to have to tack a bit more slowly to give the crew some extra time.”

“That’s going to make it harder to get ahead of the crowd,” said Ellison. “Maybe I should be more aggressive at the start to make sure we get out in front from the beginning.”

Still furious, Dickson nodded.

The start is often the most exciting part of a race—and it can be decisive. Races that are hundreds of miles long are sometimes won by just a few minutes. The first boats to get ahead enjoy uncongested water and air currents that aren’t blocked by other boats. The farther back they are in the fleet, the more yachts are forced to tack back and forth to avoid collisions. Every tack has a cost: it takes a minute or more for the crew to retune the sails and for the yacht to regain optimum speed.

A good start also provides an important emotional boost. Getting the most out of a yacht requires constant attention, an undying eagerness to raise and lower sails and to tweak dozens of lines that change the shape of the sails. The benefits from the constant recalibrating are often so slight as to be virtually imperceptible. When spirits are high, so is the motivation. No one complains about lugging another sail to the deck and folding up the old one. But if nothing seems to work, the mood sinks and no one works as hard. The fun is gone, and so is the point.

The start of the Hobart is particularly challenging. Most races that have a large number of boats have several, staggered starting times, each for a different class of yacht. The Hobart has just one starting time, even though the fleet includes a vast array of shapes and sizes, from maxis like Sayonara and Brindabella, which accelerate so quickly that they seem to have some sort of invisible propulsion system, to tubby thirty-five-foot sloops, which travel about half as fast. The experience level of each helmsman also varies, from America’s Cup veterans to weekend sailors, some of them terrified about setting out on their first Hobart.

The starting line was defined by a boat (from which the starting gun would be fired) at one end and a buoy at the other. Running north to south, the line was about half a mile long and stretched across almost the entire width of the harbor at one of its narrowest points. As Ellison guided Sayonara back and forth behind the line, the wind was blowing at just over ten knots from the northeast. Looking for openings, he felt as if he were driving an Indianapolis 500 car around the track while trying to avoid dozens of careening taxicabs.

With less than ten minutes to go before the start, Dickson pointed to another boat and said, “I think you should go above this yacht by at least twenty feet,” meaning that he wanted Ellison to turn closer to the source of the wind so Sayonara would pass on the upwind side of the other boat.

“I can do that, but do I have a choice? Maybe we should duck under him.”

“No, that would leave us in too much congestion. Your gap is above.”

On land Ellison rarely deferred to anyone, but he allowed Dickson to make many of the most important decisions on Sayonara. In fact, Ellison couldn’t even see much of what was in front of his boat because his view was obscured by sails. He had to rely on Joey Allen, who was perched at the bow and was using hand signals to send information about other boats.

After the gun signaling that five minutes remained before the start, every yacht attempted to close in on the line. It was as if a hundred pacing panthers were confined to an ever shrinking cage. They turned back and forth, testing one another, searching for an advantage, each trying to stake out territory. When there was just a minute left, Brad Butterworth, Sayonara’s tactician and one of its primary helmsmen, counted down the seconds, loud enough for Ellison and everyone in the cockpit to hear. Ellison’s eyes darted in every direction, searching for traps and openings in the impossibly concentrated field while also watching the wind’s direction and the shape of the sails.

Sayonara was close to the line. A bit too close. Tony Rae eased the mainsail so it spilled wind and Sayonara lost some of its speed. That meant Sayonara wouldn’t have a flying start, but at least it wouldn’t be stuck behind any other boats. With five seconds left, the grinders brought in the sails, and the boat surged forward.

A blast from a cannon—a replica of one that was on board Endeavour when Captain Cook reached Australia—announced the start of the race. Sayonara’s sails were brought in, and it crossed the line seconds later. There was screaming on many boats, but Ellison’s crew was almost silent as he executed a near perfect start.

Many yachtsmen assumed that Ellison’s money was the key to Sayonara’s success—and money certainly played a role. Ellison happily spent six-figure sums for a single regatta, replacing $50,000 sails the way tennis players buy a new can of balls. Sayonara sailed in only five or six major races a year, but since they were scattered all over the globe, the yacht had to be shipped between continents on cargo ships. For each trip, everything that was attached to the hull—the mast, rigging, winches, steering wheels—was removed and packed so that a kind of giant padded sock could be slipped around the boat. The hull was then lifted onto a ship, where it rested in a custom-made steel frame. The packing procedure required a week’s labor from six people—as did the reassembly at the other end. Bill Erkelens, a member of Sayonara’s sailing crew, and his wife, Melinda, who together worked as the boat’s full-time managers, oversaw the transportation. They also kept up-to-date with yachting regulations, arranged for the crew’s transportation, and took care of maintenance. It all cost money, and every month they sent a summary of expenses to one of Ellison’s assistants for his approval.

But the money represented only a small part of the story. Every maxi-yacht owner is rich. What set Sayonara apart from its peers was the quality of the crew, the way its members had learned to work together, and Ellison’s ability to retain them race after race. To some extent it was self-perpetuating: everyone likes being on the winning team. But the real key to Sayonara’s success lay in the degree to which its crewmen specialized in their jobs. On many boats, decisions about tactics and the trim of a sail are second-guessed as a matter of course. Second-guessing on Sayonara was unusual. Ellison had come to appreciate the skill of his crew, and he rarely overruled them.

Dickson encouraged crewmen to develop sharply defined roles—and to take total responsibility for them. Joey Allen, the bowman, also selected the equipment he used. Whenever a change was made to the rigging, Allen was consulted. If he wanted to move a fitting or try a different kind of pulley, Bill Erkelens would arrange for it. If Allen later wanted to go back to the old one, that was fine, too.

Immediately after the start, T. A. McCann, who was responsible for raising and lowering the sails in front of the mast, began providing commentary on the wind. Looking for ripples on the water, he tried to divine the velocity and direction of the wind that would be encountered over the next sixty seconds. Seeing where the breeze or a gust disturbed the surface of the water is easy, but judging the strength and direction of the wind, which many sailors call “pressure,” is an acquired skill of great subtlety.

“Steady pressure for the next twenty, and then we’re going to get a big puff,” T.A. called out. “Ten seconds to the puff. Ten, nine, eight …”

The goal was to help Ellison and the sail trimmers anticipate what would come next so as to create a seamless operation in which every change was reacted to rapidly and optimally. There was intelligence at every level. Sayonara’s grinders, most of them built like linebackers, may have looked as if they were selected only for their brawn, but they were all talented yachtsmen. Though they listened to T.A. and the sail trimmers, they also watched the wind and sails themselves, so they would be better prepared to act.

Communicating on a maxi-yacht is difficult, so Dickson insisted that anyone who didn’t have vital information to convey keep quiet. T.A. was the only crewman who was expected to do much talking, and even he tried to be economical, occasionally asking, “Am I talking too much?” A few minutes after the start, when someone on the rail shouted about an approaching gust, T.A. quickly shut him down. “Hey, I’ll make that call. Let’s relax. We’ve done this millions of times. Let’s stick with the system.”

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ON THE SWORD of Orion, Steve Kulmar was at the helm for the start, and Glyn Charles was at his side, suggesting tactics. Kulmar had already determined that he wanted to be on the southern end of the starting line, and he was heading in that direction.

Dags was at the bow, shouting warnings about yachts Kulmar couldn’t see. “Look out,” Dags yelled. “Nokia is coming at us again.”

The Racing Rules of Sailing, as specified by the International Sailing Federation, determine who has the right-of-way on a racecourse. A boat that is on a port tack—meaning that the wind is approaching the boat from its port, or left, side—must change course if it’s on a collision course with a boat on a starboard tack. The convention is based on the now archaic notion that the starboard side is inherently superior. In centuries past, senior shipwrights constructed that side, leaving the port side to apprentices. Captains made a point of boarding their vessels from the starboard side. Naval artillery salutes typically had an odd number of blasts because they were fired from alternate sides of the ship, with the first and last guns both coming from the starboard side. While some of those traditions have been forgotten, the supremacy of boats sailing on starboard tacks remains absolute.

The rules are more complicated when two yachts are both on the same tack: the windward boat, the one that’s closer to the source of the wind, must yield to the downwind vessel. The rules are clear, but inevitably they aren’t enough to prevent collisions or controversy.

Everywhere Sword went, Nokia, an eighty-three-foot maxi-yacht, the biggest boat in the race, appeared to follow. Kulmar thought it was deliberately shadowing him, hoping to get a better start by following his example. Kulmar may or may not have been flattering himself, but one thing was suddenly very clear: with less than a minute left before the start, Nokia was on a collision course with the Sword. Both yachts were on starboard tacks. Nokia was the windward yacht—but it wasn’t altering its course. “Go up! Go up!” Dags shouted at the big boat, trying to cause it to turn toward the wind. But Nokia did nothing to change direction. Its crewmen were also screaming, although no one on the Sword could understand what they were saying. By the time Nokia finally turned toward the wind, just a few yards away from the Sword, it was too late. Nokia’s sails, no longer filled with wind, began luffing, and the yacht drifted sideways toward the Sword. With twenty-five seconds left before the start, Nokia’s bow slammed into the Sword with a sickening crunch. The initial impact was on the Sword’s starboard side, near the back of the yacht. Then, since Nokia had more forward momentum than the Sword, the bigger boat scraped its way up the side of the Sword, doing so with the screeching sound of a train applying its brakes.

Exploding with anger, Kooky tried to push Nokia away from his boat, but by then Nokia had turned downwind again. Its sails had refilled, driving the yacht against the Sword.

“Take down your sail!” Nigel Russell, a Sword crewman, screamed at Nokia. Seeing no response, he reached into his pocket and brandished a knife. “Take your sails down—or I’ll fucking cut them down!”

When the two boats finally separated, Kooky raised a red protest flag and Dags rushed to assess the damage. Two years earlier he had been on a boat that abandoned the Hobart after it had been damaged near the starting line, and he was appalled by the idea that the same thing could happen again. First he leaned over the starboard side to see if the hull had been pierced. It hadn’t, at least above the waterline, but he saw gouges and residue from Nokia’s blue paint along a fifteen-foot-long section of the Sword’s hull, near where it met the deck. The most obvious damage was to two stanchions, the metal posts mounted around the perimeter of the deck to support the lifeline that was supposed to prevent crewmen from falling off the boat. Both stanchions had been bent toward the center of the yacht, and the base of the aftmost one had punched through the deck, creating a three-inch-wide hole.

Going below, Dags examined the inside of the hull. The damage to the deck near the two stanchions was obvious—he could see daylight through the hole—but it didn’t look like a major structural problem. Nevertheless, it had to be fixed. Though the stanchions had no impact on the structural integrity of the yacht or the way it sailed, the lifeline they held was a crucial safeguard for the crew. Also, since the base of the stanchions and a nearby fixture were sometimes used to secure equipment and safety harnesses, the strength of the deck they were attached to was important.

While the rest of the crew focused on racing, Dags removed the screws that held the stanchions to the deck and stood on them, attempting to bend them back into shape with his weight. He reattached the stanchion that had caused the hole in the deck a few inches forward from where it had stood, trying to avoid the most damaged section of the deck. He also placed a small piece of plywood under the deck as backing. By driving the screws through both the deck and the wood, he hoped the stanchion would be as secure as it was before the crash. After nearly four hours of work, he was satisfied with the repair but annoyed that the work had made it impossible for him to sit on the rail, where his weight would have helped the boat reach its optimum speed.

For his part, Kooky was sitting in front of his onboard computer, tapping out an e-mail to race officials that described the damage and blaming it on Nokia, which suffered only superficial wounds. Hoping that the officials would impose a penalty on Nokia, Kooky wrote: “The damage to the starboard stanchions has been repaired. However, delamination occurred in a meterlong section of the starboard stern quarter.”

After he finished with the stanchions, Dags inspected the mast for damage. During the collision, the Sword’s rigging had come into contact with Nokia’s, potentially creating a weakness that could bring down the mast. On the port side, about six feet up from the deck, he spotted what looked like a small bulge. “Jeez, look at this,” he said to Andrew Parkes. Although the raised area was only two or three inches in diameter, it could mean the mast was damaged. A weakened mast is a disaster waiting—probably not for very long—to happen. Bearing the load of full sails in heavy winds puts the mast under tremendous stress. Even seemingly flawless masts crumble in the Hobart. Shinnying up the mast, Dags ran his fingers over the bump, but he couldn’t determine anything about its cause. “Let’s keep an eye on it,” he said. “There’s not much else we can do.”

The collision had already imposed a heavy cost. The Sword didn’t cross the starting line until about a minute after the gun. Instead of being one of the first boats to pass through the harbor, it was forced to weave its way through much slower yachts. After months of rigorous preparation, the Sword’s crew was playing catch-up.

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KENN BATT AND Brett Gage arrived back at the Bureau of Meteorology’s offices in time to watch the start of the race on television. A few minutes later, they examined the very latest output from the Australia-based forecasting computer model, which had just arrived. For the first time, it predicted the worst possible scenario, the one that the American model had been projecting all along. The forecasters deemed the consensus between the two models significant. If they turned out to be accurate, the center of low pressure would have substantially more intensity than what had been anticipated in the bureau’s official race forecast. The more Batt looked at the data, the more certain he became that the ingredients for a dangerous, cyclone-like force—one that would be far more powerful than most yachtsmen had ever seen before—were coming together.

A cold front was moving east toward Bass Strait while warm air was flowing from the north. Both masses of air were being drawn by a region of low pressure that was also traveling east—and that appeared likely to move to a position over eastern Bass Strait just as most of the Sydney to Hobart fleet arrived there. That heavy cold air would act like a flying wedge, lifting the moist warm air upward to produce precipitation and electrical storms. And if Batt needed further evidence that the cold front was substantial, he got it in the form of a bulletin about a snowstorm in southern Australia. It wasn’t unusual for snow to fall there in the winter, but this was December, which in the Southern Hemisphere meant it was the middle of the summer. Kenn Batt and Brett Gage began to get a very bad feeling.

The Hobart has three segments. In the first, boats sail down the southernmost section of Australia’s eastern coast, where they are somewhat sheltered by land. During the final third, they travel along the east coast of Tasmania, where the island offers a degree of protection. In the middle segment—during which they cross Bass Strait—yachts are much more vulnerable. There is no land to block the wind or waves from the east or west. Indeed, the wind tends to funnel through the strait, and the shallower water there causes the waves to heighten.

If the models held true, Batt thought the first part of the race would be a joyride. The rush of air, like the current, would come from the north, providing a substantial but manageable tailwind. But it looked as though the intensifying storm would hit the fleet sometime after most of the yachts began crossing Bass Strait, the worst possible place to run into bad weather. When the fleet collided with the storm, Batt believed the wind would switch direction by something close to 180 degrees. The current and the waves would then be moving in opposite directions, a phenomenon that would have a dangerous multiplier effect on the waves. A one-knot contrary current can increase the average wave height by 20 percent, and two knots sometimes increases heights by 50 percent. Opposing currents also produce the kind of steep waves with high, arching backs that can damage even the sturdiest of vessels.

The main wild card was the course of polar jet streams. Predicting the exact course of jet streams, high-speed rivers of air that travel 30,000 feet above the earth’s surface and change direction as they collide with one another, is difficult. But while polar jet streams generally don’t extend far enough north to reach Bass Strait during the summer, satellite photographs of high-level cloud formations and weather-balloon observations suggested that one stream might do so during the race. A jet stream straddling the low would intensify it by setting off a dangerous chain reaction: the high-altitude wind would siphon the warm air out from the center of the low, further reducing the pressure at the core of the storm and speeding the rush of wind toward the low—and accelerating the system’s clockwise movement.

If it weren’t for the race, the meteorologists probably wouldn’t have thought about making a prediction at such an early stage. But aware of the problems that could ensue if a sporting event with a global following ran into unforecasted extreme weather, they leaned toward upgrading the gale warning to a “storm warning,” indicating that they believed winds would exceed forty-eight knots. After taking another look at the Australian computer output, Gage said, “If the model is right, and we go against it, it will look very bad for us.”

Everyone agreed, and at 2:14 P.M., a bit more than an hour after the race began, Peter Dundar, another bureau forecaster, sat in front of a computer terminal and clicked the cursor on an icon labeled WARNINGS to bring up a page containing the standard warning language. After he entered specific details about the weather conditions, he transmitted the alert by fax to Australia’s marine broadcast service as well as commercial radio and television stations, fishing boat owners, the Royal Australian Navy, rescue services, and the CYC, among others.

No one was more worried than Kenn Batt. More than a dozen of his friends were in the race, and he was so frightened for them that he felt physically ill. Sure that most of the yachtsmen had no idea what they were in for, all he could think about was how miserable he had been in the 1993 Hobart, the one in which only thirty-eight boats finished. He was convinced that this race would be much worse, so bad that some of his friends could die. With tears in his eyes, he told Gage, “It’s going to be a massacre.”

Gage and Batt had gone off-duty, but they stayed at the office to ring as many alarm bells as they could. Gage called Australian Search and Rescue, the government agency responsible for coordinating rescues of boats and planes at sea. “We have a priority storm warning,” Gage told Andrew Burden, an officer at the agency. “If it’s not as bad as this, I guess there’s no harm done apart from getting a few people off holidays, but if we don’t forecast it, we’re going to be in for an awful amount of criticism.”

A storm warning was the most serious warning the bureau could issue for the waters off southeastern Australia, though many of the Hobart competitors didn’t know this. Instead, they believed the most serious warning would be for a hurricane or a cyclone. But tropical cyclones, which are common in other parts of the South Pacific, do not occur off southeastern Australia because they develop only in places where the water temperature is twenty-seven degrees Celsius or higher. Different terminology didn’t mean this storm wouldn’t have the kind of wind speeds that tropical cyclones or hurricanes do, however.

The bureau also circumscribed the warning. Storm warnings are theoretically open-ended—indicating forecasted winds of anything more than forty-eight knots—but the bureau included an upper limit, predicting forty-five to fifty-five knots. The bureau’s forecasters would later claim that the forecast was for steady wind speeds and that sailors should have understood that gusts could exceed the predicted wind speed by as much as 40 percent. But although Hobart yachtsmen understood that gusts regularly exceed constant wind speeds, few had ever heard that gusts could be 40 percent greater. Others shrugged and decided that they wouldn’t worry until the forecast said something about a cyclone or a hurricane.

While sailors recognize that wind is their power supply, few have more than a superficial understanding of the complicated forces behind it or the vocabulary of meteorology. Indeed, many of the Hobart contestants believed that the gale warning the bureau issued before the start of the race was more severe than a storm warning, even though the opposite is true.

The real danger of strong winds is the waves they produce. After centuries of study, scientists still don’t fully understand waves, but they have developed formulas to estimate sea heights. Nine hours of fifty-knot wind across open ocean typically produces an average significant wave height (the average of the biggest third of all waves) of about thirty feet. But scientists also know that the patterns are regularly broken, particularly when there are strong currents and substantial variations in the depth of the sea. Sometimes, in ways that have yet to be fully understood, two or more wave crests combine, creating rogue waves, which are typically almost twice as large.

Patrick Sullivan, the director of the bureau’s operations in New South Wales and a meteorologist with four decades of experience, was so concerned by the storm warning that he interrupted his Christmas vacation to drive to the office. After looking at a sequence of satellite photographs for the previous twenty-four hours, he decided that the storm warning was a bold prediction, but entirely appropriate. Although there was no question that a low-pressure system would move up the coast, he knew it would take another twelve hours or so to know whether it would be the kind of intense low that would have a tightly wound cyclonic force. Still, given the race, he agreed that the warning was the right thing to do.

He thought the warning would cause many competitors to abandon the race. He was wrong.

9 (#ulink_25d1dbea-6f53-5e57-8ec5-ae28e002c67d)

BEFORE THE STARTING gun fired, Richard Winning was at the Winston Churchill’s helm, smoking his pipe. While most yachts were jousting for position near the front of the line, Winning was surveying the scene from near the back of the fleet. The Churchill didn’t cross the line until more than a minute after the cannon was fired. Winning was less concerned about speed and where his boat placed than Larry Ellison or Kooky. “It will be gentlemen’s ocean racing,” he had told his crew.

Nineteen-year-old Matthew Rynan, a generation younger than almost everyone on the Churchill’s crew, was disappointed. As much a kid as an adult, Rynan was a short and muscular spark plug who wore a single gold hoop through his right earlobe and a shark’s tooth around his neck. His puckish face seemed to carry a perpetual half smile. Before the race, his only real concern about the Churchill had been the age of its crewmen. Winning’s unaggressive start made him even more aware of how different he was from the rest of the crew. Come on, old man,