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

Ellison and his girlfriend, Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, had arrived in Sydney a week before the 1998 Hobart. After Melanie heard that a major storm might coincide with the race, she thought the Hobart was one challenge Ellison could live without. Just hours before the start, she and Ellison walked from their hotel along the perimeter of the harbor and into the lush Royal Botanic Garden. There she tried, as she had several times before, to talk Ellison out of going on the race.

“It’s idiotic,” she said just before they got into a car that would take them to Sayonara’s dock. “There’s no reason you have to do it. It’s much too dangerous.”

“It’s not a dangerous race,” Ellison replied. “It’s hard. It’s demanding, but only a couple of people have died since it started. There’s a perception of danger—that’s one of the reasons it’s such a cool race—but it’s actually not. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Later, Ellison would think back and wonder why he hadn’t listened to Melanie. But by then it would be too late.

2

THE HOBART IS far from the sailing world’s longest blue-water contest, but it has a reputation for being one of the most treacherous. Bass Strait, the 140-mile-wide stretch of water that separates Australia’s mainland from Tasmania, is one of the world’s most turbulent bodies of water. The two landmasses were once attached, and today the gap is much shallower than the oceans to the east and west. When waves that have been building for hundreds of miles pass over its shallow bottom, they tend to break like surf on the beach.

Many yachtsmen believe that every seventh Hobart is subject to a special curse. Particularly severe storms savaged the fleet in 1956, 1963, 1970, 1977, and 1984. In 1977, fifty-nine yachts dropped out of the race. In 1984, 104 out of 150 boats retired in gale-force winds. The pattern appeared to end in 1991—or maybe was just delayed until 1993, when only thirty-eight out of 110 starters made it to Hobart. Regardless, some of the sailors remembered that the original pattern would make 1998 one of the bad years.

But the potential for a dangerous storm wouldn’t cause CYC officials to consider postponing the race. Like yacht clubs everywhere, it abides by the five fundamental rules set by the International Sailing Federation. Rule number four declares: “A boat is solely responsible for deciding whether to start or to continue racing.”

Brett Gage, a senior forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology, arrived at his sixteenth-floor office in downtown Sydney at four o’clock on Saturday morning, nine hours before the start of the race. As in previous years, the bureau had agreed to provide special weather forecasts to the Cruising Yacht Club, and Gage had a lot to do: he had to decide on the prerace forecast, assemble a collection of weather data into information packages for each yacht, and then rush to the CYC so he could individually brief as many skippers and navigators as possible.

His biggest complication was the weather itself: nobody could agree on what it would be. At a preliminary briefing at the CYC on Christmas Eve, Kenn Batt, another forecaster from the bureau, had described several possible scenarios but said he wasn’t sure which one would actually develop. Batt and Gage based their forecasts on three global, computer-generated weather-forecasting models as well as an Australia-based model that projected only local conditions. The U.S.-based global model, which some Australian forecasters thought tended to overstate the severity of storms, was predicting an intense low-pressure system, one that could produce hurricane-force winds. The two other models, one produced by a weather center in continental Europe and the other by a center in Britain, were forecasting a much less dangerous storm. During his Christmas Eve briefing, Batt had said a low-pressure system might develop south of Australia and move north at the same time the fleet headed south or that it could fizzle out on Christmas Day. “All the computer models are saying different things,” Batt had said, provoking an outbreak of laughter. “But a strong low could be in the cards, and it could kick up strong winds and a pretty big sea.”

Predicting weather in any one place requires an evaluation of the patterns for the rest of the world. The three main forecasting models are based on millions of observation points spread around the globe. For each of more than 100,000 grid points, data on wind speed, barometric pressure, temperature, and humidity are gathered from weather stations and balloons as well as from drifting buoys and are combined with estimates for twenty-nine levels of the atmosphere for every grid point, creating more than 3 million data points. Information for every one of them, plus additional data from planes and satellites, is fed into super-computers for each of the models, which make more than 20 million calculations per second for more than an hour, to produce global pictures of the shifting temperatures, pressure, and high-altitude jet streams that create weather.

The models Batt was examining predicted very different levels of barometric pressure. The discrepancies were crucial: variations of pressure are what produce wind. At any given moment, the world’s atmosphere has more than one hundred regions of low pressure, and air from everywhere else is rushing toward them. The lower the pressure, the swifter the wind. In Southern latitudes, when the air approaches the center of the low, because of the earth’s rotation, the wind circles in a clockwise pattern (called the Coriolis effect), creating the kind of swirling clouds familiar from satellite images. If the force is powerful enough, it develops into a “tropical cyclone”—which is the same thing as a “hurricane” in America or a “typhoon” in northern Asia.

Early Saturday morning, as Gage sipped his first cup of coffee and scanned the latest satellite photographs and computer outputs, it was clear that a low was still forming, but the models continued to disagree about its intensity. The information packages he began to put together included predictions for barometric pressure as well as for wave heights and tidal changes, a satellite photograph showing that there were hardly any clouds over Australia, and a “strong wind warning,” indicating that twenty-five-to-thirty-three-knot winds should be expected. (A knot is one nautical mile, 1.15 statute miles, per hour.) But Gage knew it could be much worse, and he was afraid the race would start before he could make a definitive judgment. At 7:30 A.M. he ran into another problem: the bureau’s high-speed photocopying machine broke down, forcing him to finish running off the sheets of information for the packages at the CYC.

Kenn Batt, who was helping assemble the packages and who planned to conduct some of the briefings at the CYC, remained at the bureau, hoping to obtain updated information. Batt, who was forty-eight, had been a member of the bureau for twenty-five years but had begun forecasting long before that. As a teenager growing up in Hobart, he began producing forecasts for the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania, which he posted on a bulletin board every weekend. He knew weather and he knew sailing: Batt came from a family that had been racing for four generations, and he had sailed in seven Hobarts.

Just before 9:00 A.M. Batt received the latest output from the European and British models. They predicted lower pressure than they had before, though still not as low as the American model. Calling Gage, Batt said, “Don’t hand out the packages. We’re upgrading the forecast to a gale warning,” which indicated expected winds of thirty-four to forty-seven knots. “We’ll fax the warning through in a couple of minutes so you can incorporate it into the package.”

By the time Batt arrived at the CYC, Gage had set up a table and hung weather maps from a nearby wall. During the next three hours, representatives from eighty-six yachts picked up weather packages. Some of the yachtsmen just took them and left. Others asked lots of questions. “You’ll have a nice run this afternoon,” Batt told one of them, “but there’s a front building down south. We’re not sure which way it’s going, but it could develop and become really nasty. We could have a 1993 situation.”

3

LACHLAN MURDOCH AND Sarah O’Hare, his fiancée, began Saturday at Lachlan’s harborside house, surrounded by lush gardens and palm trees. Although Lachlan was just twenty-seven, for the previous four years he had been the chief executive officer of News Corporation’s sprawling Australian operation, which included almost two-thirds of the nation’s newspapers, more than one hundred in all, as well as magazines and a movie studio. With his press-lord powers and wealth, along with robust good looks and a reputation for racing around Sydney streets on a Ducati motorcycle, Lachlan was a major Australian celebrity. When Vogue’s Australian edition published a lengthy profile, the headline on the magazine’s cover was: LACHLAN MURDOCH: THE MAN AUSTRALIA WANTS TO SLEEP WITH. Sarah also had a following. A model, she had appeared in splashy magazine advertising for Revlon and Wonderbra and had modeled for many of the world’s most important designers in Paris.

Lachlan had already met most of Sayonara’s crew during several practice sails. As a guest, he wasn’t required to participate, but he had shown up for all of them, arriving early enough to help lug food and ice down the dock and separate cans of soda from their plastic holders. Lachlan had always recognized that people tended to define him in terms of his father, and he frequently tried to find ways to make the point that he didn’t expect special treatment. Although he knew he would be Sayonara’s least-experienced sailor, he hoped to let the others know that he wanted to do more than simply stay out of the way.

The Murdochs’ stock was already strong on Sayonara. Rupert sailed with Ellison in the 1995 Hobart, and the media mogul had also shown up for the practice sails. During one of them, he lost the end of a finger after a line he was holding pulled his hand into a block. “I’ll be fine,” he had said as he calmly held what was left of his bleeding digit over the side of the boat so he didn’t bleed on the deck. The missing piece was put on ice and reattached at St. Vincent’s Hospital a few hours later, and when he arrived at a crew dinner that night, he declared, “Right, now I’m ready to go to Hobart.”

During the race itself, Rupert had spent most of the first night seated on “the rail,” the outside edge of the deck, with his legs dangling over the side. When he got up and offered to serve coffee or tea, several crewmen took him up, each specifying his cream and sugar preferences. Rupert shuttled up and down the steps delivering steaming mugs until a Team New Zealand sailor named Kevin Shoebridge cut him short: “Rupert, for fuck’s sake, I said no sugar. Make me another.” Rupert laughed as much as anyone, and in Hobart he won more points when he slapped a credit card on the bar, declaring, “I want to get the last laugh with you guys, so let’s try to put a dent in this.”

While growing up on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, Lachlan worked for company-owned papers during school vacations: first as a reporter at the Express-News in San Antonio, Texas, and later as an editor at The Sun in London. One year after he graduated from Princeton University, he became the publisher of The Australian, the only nationwide general-interest daily paper. Soon after the 1998 Hobart, Lachlan expected to start spending most of his time in New York and to take responsibility for the company’s publishing operations in the United States, including HarperCollins, the New York Post, and TV Guide.

But Lachlan wasn’t his father’s clone, and he didn’t try to be. He was known to burn joss sticks in his spacious offices in Sydney and New York, and the discs sitting near a wall-mounted CD player in Sydney were cutting edge and eclectic. When Lachlan rolled up his sleeves, his left forearm revealed a striking Polynesian-design tattoo. Even when presiding over meetings, Lachlan was relaxed and unguarded, throwing his legs over the arms of couches and punctuating lots of his sentences with question marks the way teenagers do. He spoke softly in an accent that reflected his peripatetic upbringing: there were hints of Australia and England, although the dominant strain was American. Like his father, Lachlan had an informal approach to management. But while Rupert could be gruff and intimidating, Lachlan was almost always welcoming and gentlemanly. Friends used old-fashioned words like “earnest” and “gallant” to describe him.

Lachlan also had a serious appetite for adventure. In that way he was like Ellison, although their specific tastes were somewhat different. Whereas Ellison chased speed, Lachlan liked danger, the sense that he was putting himself on the edge. While at Princeton, where he majored in philosophy, he spent several hours a day climbing sheer rock faces. More recently he had discovered that his motorcycle provided the same thrill but required less time. “There are people who in their makeup need to take risks,” Lachlan told friends. “Every once in a while I just have to do things that require me to make judgments about how far I can go. It’s not that it’s dangerous as much as it’s unprotected, if you know what I mean.”

Lachlan chose his friends without much regard to what they did, although he also spent time with his father’s friends, a Who’s Who of global business titans. In fact, one of Rupert’s friends, Michael Milken, was the reason Lachlan was sailing to Hobart on Sayonara. Lachlan and Rupert were among the guests at the onetime junk bond king’s annual Fourth of July party in 1998. As lunch was being served in the backyard of Milken’s house overlooking California’s Lake Tahoe, Ellison, who was also a guest, asked Rupert if he wanted to sail another Hobart on Sayonara. When Rupert said he couldn’t, Ellison asked Lachlan. “It wouldn’t seem right if we didn’t have a Murdoch on board. Do you want to come?”

Lachlan jumped at the chance. “Absolutely. I’d love to.”

Lachlan had learned to sail from his father, who raced small boats in his twenties and thirties. (Rupert still sailed, but it was mostly on a vast yacht designed to be comfortable rather than fast. “It’s so big, it’s not really a sailboat anymore,” said Lachlan, who bought his own boat in 1995, which he named Karakoram for the mountain range that includes K2.) Lachlan sailed as much as he could. “For someone who has a job that keeps their mind kind of ticking over all the time, it’s a great way to force yourself to think about something other than work.” He had raced his own boat in the 1997 Hobart, and he thought he would learn a lot from crewing on Sayonara.

After leaving his house Saturday morning, Lachlan arrived at a restaurant near the CYC in time for a crew meeting. It was conducted by Chris Dickson, who had replaced Paul Cayard as Sayonara’s professional skipper a couple of years earlier. In a room where the walls and tables were painted with nautical scenes and old sails hung from the ceiling, Dickson spoke from two pages of typewritten notes, conducting the meeting as if it were a corporate planning session.

“Meals. We have three dinners, and we should figure on a three-day race. If we do it in two and a half, that’s great; but we should plan on three days.

“Bunks. Larry and I have assigned bunks, so if you need us in a hurry, you’ll know where to find us.

“The start. There will be a hunded and fifteen boats at the starting line. We do twice the speed as the small boats, and we don’t want to have a collision. If you’re not busy, keep your head down. We have to keep the noise down. The warning gun goes at twelve-fifty.

“Brindabella. We have to keep an eye on them. They’re very strong, and it’s clearly the boat we have to beat.”

When he was done, Dickson introduced Roger “Clouds” Badham, a consulting meteorologist who made his living providing forecasts to yachtsmen and was so highly regarded that America’s Cup contenders regularly competed for his services. Clouds, as he was called by everyone, ran through the specifics of his forecast, which called for pleasant weather on Saturday and worsening conditions thereafter. Then he looked up from his notes and spoke plainly: “It’s going to be tough out there. There’s a pretty good chance it could be really tough—and if it is, you could be in for a nightmare of a race.”

Ellison, who had skipped the meeting so he could take a walk with Melanie, stepped onto Sayonara at eleven. By then Robbie Naismith and Tony Rae, two of Team New Zealand’s key members, were doing a final inventory of the sails they were taking for the race. Other crewmen were replacing the floorboards, which had been removed so that a dehumidifier could suck up moisture from the bilge. Chris Dickson and Mark Rudiger were standing in the cockpit discussing tactics. The rest of the crew was milling about the deck, bantering with sailors from nearby boats and trying to relax. Sayonara often attracted lots of attention because of its famous owner and track record, and the crowd was even larger than normal because of Lachlan and his photogenic fiancée. After saying hello to Lachlan and Sarah, Ellison sat down in the cockpit with Dickson.

Dickson was a crucial ingredient to Sayonara’s success. Like Ellison, he was intense and demanding. “We have an uncompromising commitment to winning,” the thirty-seven-year-old New Zealander would say of his approach to managing Sayonara. “We don’t accept excuses for anything. We have an absolutely ruthless approach to doing the best we can.”

Even back when he started winning junior championships in Auckland, Dickson’s friends talked about his competitive zeal and killer instinct. Three times he was named New Zealand’s junior sailing champion. In 1987, he was the skipper of Kiwi Magic, the first New Zealand yacht to compete for the America’s Cup, held that year in Fremantle, Australia. Dickson lost only one of the first thirty-four races leading up to the selection of the challenger; but in the final round of the challenger races, he lost to Dennis Conner, who went on to win the Cup.

Since then, Dickson had competed in two other America’s Cups and the 1993–94 Whitbread Race. It was in the latter that he had the most impact. In previous years, yachts had carried full-time chefs to prepare hot meals that were sometimes accompanied by wine. Dickson brought nothing but freeze-dried food and drinks that were called milk shakes but were actually synthetic concoctions designed to deliver various nutritional supplements efficiently. “By bringing America’s Cup discipline to the race, Dickson changed the Whitbread forever,” said T. A. McCann, who crewed on Dickson’s boat.

Dickson was famous for his capacity to intimidate the world’s greatest sailors and for the way he always asked for more. Once while training for the 1987 America’s Cup, his crew thought they were done for the day until Dickson said, “Let’s do ten more tacks.” Then there were ten more, and another ten. On an America’s Cup boat, every tack—turning the boat so that the wind approaches from a different side—is hard work. The repetition of quickly cranking in the big sails was like an unbroken series of wind sprints. Tony Rae, who was trimming the mainsail and who also performed that job for Team New Zealand and Sayonara, still remembered the afternoon. “Everyone knew that any suggestion that we had done enough would have been rewarded with more work. In the end, we did fifty tacks.”

Before he hired Dickson, Ellison had asked T. A. McCann, an America’s Cup veteran who had sailed on Sayonara for all of its races, the kind of questions he always posed when looking for something: “Who’s the best sailor you’ve ever sailed with? Who’s the best sailor in the world?”

“It’s not even close—it’s Chris Dickson,” T.A. replied. Like everyone who had sailed with Dickson, T.A. had suffered from his wrath, but he believed that was a price worth paying. “He’s a fanatical perfectionist who has a terrible reputation for being hard on people,” T.A. told Ellison, “but he’s the most talented sailor alive today.”

Dickson reminded Ellison of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer and Ellison’s best friend. Like Jobs, Ellison said, “Dickson wants to do everything perfectly, all the time. He’s so brilliant at what he does and so unforgiving of himself that he becomes unforgiving of others.” But while Ellison tried to rationalize Dickson’s rough edges, he was also a bit amazed. “Dickson will yell at Joey Allen,” Ellison said, referring to the principal bowman on Sayonara and Team New Zealand. “That is unbelievable. Joey Allen is the best bowman in the world.”

While Dickson would be responsible for sailing the boat and managing the crew, Mark Rudiger, a forty-four-year-old Californian who rarely cracked a smile, would make many of the strategic decisions. In the 1993–94 Whitbread Race, which Dickson would have won if his mast hadn’t snapped toward the end of the contest, Rudiger was the winning yacht’s navigator. Ellison considered him the world’s best.

Rudiger, who usually hunched to bring his six-foot five-inch height down to other people’s, began sailing across oceans in the 1960s when his parents took him out of school to circumnavigate the world. By the time he was twenty, he was back in California, where he bought a broken-down boat that he raced single-handed. While attending a maritime academy, he began learning about navigation. In years since, the role of the navigator had changed dramatically because of technological advances. With the introduction of the satellite-based Global Positioning System, or GPS, which determines location by triangulating off satellite signals, one of the most important tasks—determining a vessel’s location—had become a matter of pushing a button. Navigators had begun to spend most of their time making strategic decisions about the best course to sail. Understanding the weather was one of their most crucial jobs.

The weather was what Ellison wanted to know about. “When are we going to get the bad stuff? How long is it going to last?”

“We’re going to have a northerly breeze at the start,” Rudiger answered, “but by nightfall, there will be a change. In fact, it’s going to be a pretty aggressive change. We could get sixty knots.”

“It sounds like another Hobart,” Ellison quipped.

“In terms of strategy,” Rudiger continued, “we have to keep track of what the current does. Tactically, we need to keep tabs on Brindabella. We should be able to beat them on a boat-to-boat basis, but they could beat us on tactics, so we can’t let them get too far away from us.”

“We have to make sure we’re the first boat to get out of the harbor,” Dickson added, “but we don’t have to be first across the starting line. It’s more important that we get a clean start. We can’t have any equipment breakdowns or protests.”

Ellison planned to be at the helm for the start. The crew knew that Sayonara performed best when Dickson was at the wheel—but they also understood that Ellison enjoyed the challenge of driving the boat and that ownership entitled him to some perquisites. In the 1995 Hobart, Ellison didn’t steer at the start, and he was looking forward to doing it himself this time. “Ellison is the boss and that’s it,” Dickson had told the other main helmsmen one day earlier. “He’ll have the helm for the start, and he’ll keep it until he gets sick of it. I’ll be there to give him guidance.”

In fact, by most standards, Ellison had become an excellent helmsman. He had been coached by some of the world’s best teachers, and his personality was well matched to the job. He was rarely intimidated, and he handled chaos better than most people did. Even Dickson had confidence in his boss’s skill—or as much confidence as Dickson had in anyone but himself.

4

ROB KOTHE’S ALARM clock sounded at 3:30 A.M. on Saturday morning. The owner of the Sword of Orion began the day by filling a mug with his favorite drink, Sustagen, a vitamin-fortified chocolate mix, into which he sprinkled a teaspoon of ground coffee beans. Walking into his study, he logged on to his computer and called up data from the same global weather models Kenn Batt and Brett Gage were studying. Kothe had been doing the same thing every day for several weeks, and with good reason: in ocean racing, judgments about where the winds and currents are strongest are pivotal.