Any other day, they would have slipped quietly into Constitution Dock. But when 70-year-old Kathy Veel and 62-year-old Bridget Canham crossed the Sydney to Hobart finish line – the last of the fleet to do so – at 11.42pm on New Year’s Eve, it was as if they’d heralded the early arrival of 2023.
A crowd in the thousands who had packed out the Hobart shoreline to ring in the new year chanted ″Currawong, Currawong!″ as the two-hander made its way past the packed-out Taste of Summer festival and around Constitution Dock.
The crew of Currawong are welcomed by revellers at Hobart.Credit:CYCA
Cheers came from the water, too, where boats had lined up to greet the nine-metre yacht as it pushed up the River Derwent.
After a lap of honour around the thrilled spectators, interviews on the boat, and the well-deserved popping of a giant bottle of champagne: the fireworks. Veel and Canham watched from the 1973 vessel that had carried them south.
You couldn’t have written a better ending to a story that stretched five days at sea, 630 nautical miles, and a day of waiting in Eden as they waited for bad weather in Bass Strait to pass.
“You wouldn’t believe the stops we pulled to get this happening,” said Canham. “The biggest challenge we had was getting here before New Year’s Eve,” she said. “We’ve been working our butts off to get here. And it’s paid off.”
Kathy Veel (left) and Bridget Canham on Currawong in Sydney before the race start.Credit:Salty Dingo
Veel said the experience was “unbelievable”. “[It was like] nothing I’ve ever had … in my whole life, she said. “When you heard people going, ‘Curr-a-wong!’, I thought, ‘What?!’
“I’m really proud of what we’ve done.”
The sailors described the weather conditions down the coast as “brilliant”.
“The boat behaved so well, it was just magic,” said Canham, a retired nurse.
The sailors are among the oldest to compete in the Sydney to Hobart race, and certainly the oldest in the race’s new two-handed fleet section. But Veel, a retired teacher now living in Bulbarra, near Katoomba, said they didn’t want to be defined by their age – nor their sex.
“It’s not, to be honest, how we think of ourselves,” said Veel in the lead-up to the race. “We’re sailors who happen to be women rather than women who sail.
Veel purchased the boat last year, and ran a GoFundMe page to raise financial support so the pair could purchase the necessary supplies to enter the race.
In 2021, Veel was named Blue Mountains Volunteer of the Year for her work with the not-for-profit sailing-based Making Waves Foundation.
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