Every Boxing Day around 1pm, I have trouble keeping my food down. It’s a trigger from the starting gun of the Sydney to Hobart, sailing in which is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced.
I wanted to know why they did it, but nobody on the boat I joined could tell me. They were too busy, or to them it was a stupid question with a self-evident answer.
Same race, different boat, different year, but you get the picture.Credit:Dallas Kilponen
The nightmare started a week before the race, when we did a training day outside Sydney Heads. The 50-foot boat was privately owned by two nice guys called Ken and Richard, with half a dozen of their mates aboard. The seeds of our destruction, however, had already been sown when Ken and Richard had accepted a sponsorship deal with a big international race. The boat was renamed BT Global Challenge, and along with Ken and Richard and their mates, we had six professional English round-the-world sailors doing the Sydney to Hobart as some kind of side hustle. They had their own ideas about Ken’s leadership, as professionals often do when led by amateurs. Two different cultures. Plus a fly on the wall.
On that training day, as I sang the Gilligan’s Island theme song in my head (“A three-hour tour …“), I was given the job of loosening and tightening the stay, a long wire joining the top of the mast to the stern. This was a simple task which also gave me the privacy to throw up to my heart’s content off the back of the boat without anyone noticing. It was the longest three hours, thrown about by the ocean swells (a kilometre from Sydney’s Nielsen Park), and the week waiting for the race was filled with dread.
As it is this year, the forecast was for friendly nor-easters followed by a southerly change. Boxing Day was splendid and sunny, and massing in the harbour felt nervously beautiful. We were never a competitive threat, but the crew had a race-within-the-race rivalry going with a similar-sized boat. As we tussled with that boat to get out of Sydney Harbour, we managed to put our spinnaker under the hull and tear it in half. So our pace down the east coast was limited while the English professionals crouched inside the forward half of the boat sewing it up by hand.
When they say friendly nor-easters, that just means you have a tailwind. The swells, however, move faster than a yacht, so when a wave passes under you, every 10 seconds or so, your boat feels like it is falling off a cliff before whumping down into the trough between waves. I spent that sunny day and a half emptying my guts. It was horrendous, a continuation of the ordeal of training day but without end. I was distantly aware that even the professionals doing the sewing were seasick. Misery loves company, but this was a solitary suffering. Every minute felt like an hour.
Illustration: DionneCredit:
They say you should never keep a gun on a boat because a quick death is too tempting an alternative. My condition was aggravated by the fact that, thanks to an imaginative editor with a sadistic streak, I was on the boat to file stories, by satellite phone, each day. I tried to write on a pad, but the concentration made me vomit. I tried to compose sentences in my head, but the image of words was also sickening. Somehow I managed to make these calls, stopping every few words to puke. On top of the constant sickness I grew paranoid that my crewmates would either overhear me or would be told from land what preposterous lily-livered nonsense was living among them.
I’d stopped asking why they were doing this horrendous thing. It was just survival.
Then the southerly hit.
We were in Bass Strait when the black bank of cloud formed up and charged at us like an army. You could see the water turn white in the distance. I’d thought it was horrible sailing with the wind. The headwind added to the nausea and sleeplessness (I’d slept about two hours on the first day, and that was it for the next three) and the fear that we would capsize.
The technicolour Sydney to Hobart. Credit:Dallas Kilponen
The sails were trimmed back to a minimum, so at least our lack of spinnaker stopped hurting our progress. When I say progress, I mean lack of progress. I don’t know how we got across Bass Strait, I honestly don’t.
We made it, but if downwind was sickening and upwind was terrifying and exhausting, there was worse in store. Somewhere near Eaglehawk Neck, all wind stopped and so did we. We were becalmed, bobbing like a cork. Two and a half days in, and now, beside the pretty Tasmanian coast, we were not actually going to get there.
The lid over the tensions in the crew, which had been simmering, came off. Some fruity exchanges in mariners’ language now livened up our lack of movement. I wasn’t seasick anymore, just homesick.
Rounding Tasman Island, we were hit head-on by another squall. Storm Bay was named by a nautical chap and his name was Captain Obvious. The last night brought us a new low, compounded by the constant work tacking against the wind. We had changed direction just once between Sydney – a right turn at South Head – but since Bass Strait it had been one 72-hour shift, port to starboard and back again so often you could do it in your sleep. If you did sleep.
Finally, in sight of Hobart town, we were becalmed again. This coincided with us locating our arch rival, the other 50-footer we were racing against. Chasing zephyr-light wind shifts, all was slow motion except the arguments between our two factions. At least we had our spinnaker back. But, after three days and 15 hours, the other boat finished ahead of us by a few metres.
I have never wanted anything as much as I wanted Constitution Dock. We moored and tied up.
That was when I found the answer. So sweet was the feeling of land, I literally dropped to my knees and kissed the concrete. Do you do that? I did. We had lunch in a restaurant in Salamanca Place, all friends again, and I can still taste the mashed potato. I went to my motel and slept. I will never forget those three experiences: solid ground, the taste of concrete and mashed potato, and sleep in a bed. Each was a lifetime peak.
So, I suppose the answer to the question is like the proverb about the person who bangs his head against a wall because he likes how it feels when he stops. I can appreciate the sport now but only if I try not to think about it too much. I was never remotely inclined to do it again, and it became a moot point three years later, in 1998, when six sailors died during a catastrophic storm-hit race, and someone walking in off the street looking for a boat was no longer permitted. A good thing that was.
The Boxing Day queasiness has never left. Part of me wonders, deep down, if the sailors are really sure why they do it. Then I remember Constitution Dock, the mashed potato, and that sleep, and I get an idea not so much of how the awfulness is redeemed at the end, but why that cycle of pain and pleasure can be such an addiction. They can have it.
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