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

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.”

5

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.

6

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.”

7

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.