THE PROVING GROUND
The Story of the Disastrous Sydney to Hobart Boat Race 1998
G. BRUCE KNECHT

COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition first published in 2002

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Fourth Estate

Copyright © G. Bruce Knecht 2001

The right of G. Bruce Knecht to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007292080

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007392544

Version: 2016-01-29

DEDICATION

For Elizabeth

MAP

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

MAP

PROLOGUE

PART I: THE CALM

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

PART II: EAST OF EDEN

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

PART III: THE BLACK CLOUD

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

PART IV: ADRIFT

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

PART V: WAKE

36

37

38

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE

LARRY ELLISON WAS lying in his bunk, calculating the likelihood that he would die.

He was, thanks to his stock in his company, Oracle, one of the wealthiest men in the world. But right now, he was seasick and miserable, and the NASDAQ seemed very far away.

One day earlier, he had seen what was coming. Looking at one of the two laptop computers used on his boat, he saw a satellite-generated image of a cyclone-like cloud pattern. Gripped with the same surreal feeling of disconnectedness he sometimes had when he was flying a plane on instruments, he asked Mark Rudiger, the yacht’s navigator, “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

Almost imperceptibly, Rudiger shook his head.

“Well, I have,” Ellison declared, his voice rising in bewildered outrage. “It was on the Weather Channel—and it was called Hurricane Helen. What the fuck is that doing here?”

Ellison’s yacht Sayonara had been struggling ever since. Steep forty-foot waves were sucking Sayonara up terrifying crests and then releasing it into deep troughs. Going up felt like riding an elevator during an earthquake; going down felt as though the elevator’s cable had snapped. The boat’s hull was made from two skins of carbon fiber surrounding a core of foam. Carbon fiber is a synthetic material with incredible strength for its weight, but Ellison knew that structural elements were beginning to fail. Several of the bulkheads, critical to maintaining the integrity of the hull, were no longer even attached. Large oval blisters had developed on the hull’s inside surface near the bow, indicating that the carbon skin had separated from the foam interior and that the two surfaces were grating against each other. Ellison knew that at some point the hull would become so weak that it would collapse like a paper bag against one of the waves. He also knew that Sayonara was too far out at sea to be reached by helicopter and that if he ended up in the water, he was unlikely to survive long enough to be rescued by another vessel.

By every standard but his own, Ellison, who looked younger than his fifty-four years, lived the life of dreams. On most days, he directed his company of 37,000 employees without even showing up at the office. He preferred to keep in touch by phone and e-mail from Katana, his 240-foot power yacht, or from his elegantly simple Japanese-style house in Atherton, California, where a pond was filtered like a swimming pool to ensure that the water was always crystal clear.

But Ellison was motivated by a kind of deeply rooted ambition that would never be satisfied. He was born to an unwed mother who gave him up for adoption. His adoptive father repeatedly told him he would never amount to anything. Since then, Ellison’s successes had only expanded his appetites. Although he carried himself with the bouncy manner of an adolescent who has just won an athletic championship, his dark brown eyes appeared coldly focused and constantly calculating. In a rarefied form of keeping up with the Joneses, much of the calculus involved his greatest rival, Microsoft’s Bill Gates. It was a rivalry that, in Ellison’s mind at least, went far beyond business and money. Ellison, who wrote short stories, played the piano, and piloted stunt planes in addition to winning sailing regattas, was constantly seeking to portray himself as more talented and more broadly gauged than Gates.

To Ellison, life was an experiment, or a contest, with a singular purpose: determining just how good he could be. Speed was an overriding theme. In addition to Sayonara, Ellison had a collection of high-performance planes and cars. With its 18,500-horsepower engine, Katana could charge through the water at thirty-five miles an hour. Ellison had given a lot of thought to his endless quest to go fast. “There are two aspects of speed,” he told friends. “One is the absolute notion of speed. Then there’s the relative notion—trying to go faster than the next guy. I think it’s the latter that is much more interesting. It’s an expression of our primal being. Ever since we were living in villages as hunter-gatherers, great rewards went to people who were stronger, faster.”

Ellison had entered the Sydney to Hobart Race because it is one of sailing’s most challenging contests. The danger had been part of the appeal. But as he lay in his bunk and looked around the cabin, where some of the world’s best sailors were lying on heaps of wet sails and retching into buckets, he was having second thoughts about his compulsive need to win.

Sayonara burrowed deep into each oncoming wall of water. Then, as if remembering it was supposed to float, it bobbed straight up to the wave’s crest. At that point Ellison began to count—“one one thousand, two one thousand”—as the bow projected out of the wave’s other side, again seeming to defy the natural order of things, until such a large section of the seventy-nine-foot vessel was hanging freely that gravity brought it down. That motion seemed to continue forever, although he had only reached “four one thousand” when the cycle ended with a violent crash.

This, he kept saying to himself, would be a stupid way to die.

PART I THE CALM

1

PHYSICALLY AND CULTURALLY, the harbor is the center of Sydney, never more so than the day after Christmas, when the start of the 630-mile race from Sydney to Hobart, a city on the east coast of Tasmania, causes it to become an enormous natural amphitheater. Virtually everyone in Sydney watches the start, either in person or on television. Parks, backyards, and rooftops overflow with thousands of spectators, most of them with drinks in hand. The harbor itself is crowded with hundreds of boats and is noisy with air horns and low-flying helicopters.

No place is busier than the source of all the excitement, the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia. The club was founded in 1945, the same year it sponsored the first Sydney to Hobart Race. The CYC’s home is an undistinguished, two-story brick building on the bank of Rushcutters Bay, just a couple of miles east of downtown Sydney. Its pretensions, to the extent it has any, are related to “the Hobart,” as the race is usually called, rather than to social distinctions. Sailing has always played an important role in Australian life. It’s not surprising to hear policemen and taxi drivers describe themselves as yachtsmen. On an island as big as the United States but with a population of less than 19 million, access to the waterfront has never been limited to the rich. The CYC’s founders wanted to make sure it stayed that way, and in 1998 its 2,500 members paid annual dues of just $250, a tenth of what they were at some yacht clubs in the United States and Europe.

But although the CYC was modest in dues, it was not so when it came to its race. The main bar, which opens onto a large deck and a network of docks, is adorned with photographs of evocatively named Hobart-winning yachts: Assassin, Love & War, Ragamuffin, Rampage, Sagacious, Scallywag, Screw Loose, and Ultimate Challenge. In the slightly more formal bar on the second floor, a plaque carries the names of forty-three men who had completed at least twenty-five Hobarts. Although women had been competing regularly since 1946, none had yet earned a place on the plaque.

The CYC’s race draws the biggest names in sailing as well as prominent figures from other fields. Rupert Murdoch competed in six races, and his fifty-nine-foot yacht Ilina, a classic wooden ketch, came in second in 1964. Sir Edward Heath, the former British prime minister, won in 1969. Three years later, Ted Turner shocked other skippers by brazenly steering his American Eagle through the spectator boats after the start of the race—and then going on to win it. In 1996, Hasso Plattner, the multibillionaire cofounder of SAP AG, the German computer software giant, won in record-breaking time.

The very first race took place after Captain John Illingworth, a British naval officer who was stationed in Sydney during World War II, was invited to join a pleasure cruise from Sydney to Hobart, Australia’s second-oldest city and at one time an important maritime center. Only if it’s a race, he is said to have responded. It was agreed, and Illingworth’s thirty-nine-foot sloop Rani beat eight other yachts to win the first Hobart in six and a half days. Until the 1960s it usually took four or five days to complete the course. In the following decades, the average time required shrank to three or four. Plattner’s Morning Glory took just over two and a half days in 1996. The quickening pace reflected two of the biggest changes in competitive sailing: first, the move away from wooden boats, which were constructed according to instinct and tradition, to ones designed with the help of computers and built from fiberglass, aluminum, and space-age composite materials, and second, the transformation of what had been a purely amateur sport to one with an expanding number of full-time professionals.

For most of its history, sailing had proudly resisted the move to professionalism that had transformed many sports. But even Sir Thomas Lipton—whose five spirited but unsuccessful America’s Cup campaigns, which stretched from 1899 through 1930, earned him an almost saintlike reputation—understood the value of sponsorship. The publicity engendered by his prolonged pursuit of the Cup did much to make his tea a popular brand in the United States.

Since then, the level of competition has steadily risen, requiring increasing amounts of time and money. In 1977, Ted Turner spent six months and $1.7 million preparing his winning America’s Cup campaign. The only compensation he gave his crew was room and board. In 2000, five American contenders for the Cup planned to spend the better part of three years and more than $120 million preparing for the contest. Patrizio Bertelli, the head of the Italian fashion house Prada, provided the syndicate representing his country with a $50 million budget.

Ellison, who planned to compete for the America’s Cup in 2003, expected to spend at least $80 million. He would pay many members of his crew upwards of $200,000 a year for the more than two years they would train together. Ellison, who intended to sail on the boat—at least some of the time as its helmsman—would also take advantage of computer-based performance analyses and boatbuilding technologies that had been unthinkable even a few years earlier.

Turner, who had sailed on Sayonara for several races, was of two minds about what has happened to the sport he once dominated. During one race, he told Gary Jobson, his longtime tactician, “There are so many computers. Whatever happened to sailing by feel?”

As one of the computer industry’s pioneers, Ellison had no such qualms.

Ellison, who won the Hobart in 1995, had two goals for the 1998 race. First and foremost, he wanted to take the record away from Plattner. After Bill Gates, Plattner was Ellison’s most important competitor in the software business, and sailing had intensified their rivalry and added a deeply personal dimension. “It’s a blood duel,” Ellison would say, without the slightest suggestion that he was anything but deadly serious. He boasted that his yacht Sayonara, which didn’t race in the Hobart the year the record was set, had never lost to Plattner’s Morning Glory. Ellison and Plattner were not on speaking terms, but they had found other ways to express themselves. During one regatta, Plattner—incensed by what he felt was unsportsmanlike behavior by Ellison—dropped his pants and “mooned” Sayonara’s crew. Ellison’s other goal was to beat George Snow.

Snow, a charismatic Australian who had won the Hobart in 1997, and Ellison could hardly have been more different from each other. The crew on Snow’s yacht, Brindabella, was almost all amateur. On Sayonara, with the exception of two guests—one of them Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s eldest son and heir apparent—everyone was a professional. Ten of Ellison’s twenty-three crewmen were members of Team New Zealand, which had won the America’s Cup in 1995 and planned to defend it in 2000.

Ellison had always been upsetting traditions and bucking the odds. After his mother decided she couldn’t take care of him, he was adopted by an aunt and uncle. Ellison never got along with his adoptive father, Louis Ellison, a Russian immigrant who took his name from Ellis Island and worked as an auditor. Growing up in a small apartment on the South Side of Chicago, Ellison wasn’t interested in school or organized sports or anyone telling him what to do. “I always had problems with authority,” Ellison would explain. “My father thought that if someone was in a position of authority that he knew more than you did. I never thought that. I thought if someone couldn’t explain himself, I shouldn’t blindly do what I was told.”

After dropping out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then the University of Chicago, where he learned to write computer software, Ellison drove a beat-up car to California. Although he had little trouble getting hired, staying so was a different story. He stumbled through a raft of computer-related jobs until he heard about a new kind of software that could store and quickly manipulate large databases. Seeing its potential, he launched a business in 1977 that would become Oracle. The company doesn’t produce the kind of software that consumers buy or even know much about, but every organization that stores significant amounts of data needs it. For most of its first decade, sales doubled every year, so quickly that Oracle appeared to be on the verge of going totally out of control. Ellison’s personal life was equally rocky. He married and divorced three times, and he broke his neck in a surfing accident.

In 1990, Ellison was almost booted out of his own company after Oracle disclosed that some of its employees had booked millions of dollars of sales that hadn’t actually materialized. But by the mid-1990s it seemed that Ellison’s high-stakes, step-skipping management style was entirely appropriate for an industry that was changing faster than any traditional organization could. Ellison was confident that no company was better suited than his to capitalize on the burgeoning Internet. After all, the first generation of e-commerce blue bloods—Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo!—all relied on Oracle software. Thanks to them, and their gravity-defying stock prices, Ellison believed that the value of Oracle’s shares would also explode. And he thought that would enable him to achieve his ultimate ambition—to replace Bill Gates as the world’s richest man.

Ellison had always been interested in sailing. As a child, he imagined being able to travel to exotic places on the yachts he saw on Lake Michigan. Soon after he moved to California, he bought a thirty-four-foot sloop, although he gave it up because he couldn’t afford it. In 1994, Ellison’s next-door neighbor, a transplanted New Zealander named David Thomson, suggested the idea of building a maxi-yacht. The largest kind of boat permitted in many races, maxis are about eighty feet long. Ellison said yes, but he imposed a couple of conditions. First, he wanted it to be the fastest boat of its kind. Second, he wanted Thomson to do all the work. Thomson was a private investor affluent enough to live in Ellison’s neighborhood, but he wasn’t in a position to spend 3 or 4 million dollars for his own maxi. Deciding that it would be fun to oversee the design and construction of Ellison’s boat, Thomson readily agreed to his terms.

Typically, when someone decides to build a boat, he or she wants to be involved in the plans, but Ellison made it clear that he didn’t want to know about the details. When Thomson walked over to Ellison’s house with a set of engineering drawings, they spent only a few minutes talking about the boat before Ellison turned the conversation to his newest plane, which they discussed for more than an hour. Thomson did send Ellison occasional e-mail updates. At the end of one, Thomson, who had heard that Ellison was going to the White House for a state dinner honoring the emperor of Japan, asked about the protocol for such an occasion. “What will you wear? Do Americans bow to the emperor?” At the end of the e-mail, Thomson wrote, “Have a great time. Sayonara.”

Seconds after he pushed the SEND button, he sent another e-mail: “Sayonara. That’s not a bad name for a boat.”

Ellison didn’t answer Thomson’s White House etiquette questions, but to the name suggestion, he punched out an instant reply: “That’s it.”

Sayonara was completed in Auckland in May 1995, just a few days after Team New Zealand won the America’s Cup—a victory that the tiny nation commemorated with four ticker-tape parades and an outpouring of nationalistic pride rivaling the celebrations that followed World War II. Thomson had recruited almost half of Sayonara’s crew from the winning squad, and they flew to San Francisco for Sayonara’s inaugural sail shortly after the last parade. Thomson hired Paul Cayard to be the boat’s first professional skipper. Cayard, who was the lead helmsman for Dennis Conner on Stars & Stripes, the boat that lost the Cup to the Kiwis, had competed in a total of five America’s Cup regattas and in 1998 won the around-the-world Whitbread Race. To round out the crew, Cayard recruited several other members from Stars & Stripes to sail on Sayonara, creating a dream team of American and Kiwi yachtsmen.

When they met on Sayonara’s deck in Alameda, across the bay from downtown San Francisco, the newly assembled crewmen were impressed by what they saw. Everything on the boat was black or white except for the red that filled the o in Sayonara’s name painted on the side of the hull. White hulls typically have a dull finish, but Sayonara’s reflected the shimmering water like a mirror. The 100-foot mast, which bent slightly toward the stern and tapered near the top, was black, as were the sail covers, winches, and instruments. Like most modern racers, Sayonara had a wide stern and a broad cockpit, on which stood a pair of large side-by-side steering wheels. Sayonara was narrower than most other maxis and, at twenty-three tons, lighter than most of its peers. The unpainted interior was carbon-fiber black. While there is nothing pleasant about a windowless black cabin, paint has weight, and the lack of it only emphasized the commitment to speed.

The front third of Sayonara was an empty black hole except for long bags of sails. There was a similar-looking black cavern in the back of the boat. Only the center section was designed to be inhabited by sailors, and even there the accommodations were spartan. Pipes, wires, and mechanical devices protruded from the walls, and nothing was done to cover them. Just as David Thomson had promised, Sayonara was a pure racing machine.

Within three years, Sayonara had become virtually invincible, winning three straight maxi-class world championships as well as the Newport to Bermuda Race, America’s most prestigious offshore race. Ellison couldn’t have been more pleased. “I could have bought the New York Yankees, but I couldn’t be the team’s shortstop. With the boat, I actually get to play on the team.”

Getting to know the crew was part of the fun. Ellison discovered that many of them shared his interests in planes and fast cars, and he enjoyed being with men who were driven and competitive but wanted nothing from him beyond the chance to sail on Sayonara. Ellison was so pleased by his crew and so confident of their abilities that in 1997 he arrived at the maxi championship regatta, which was held in Sardinia, with Rolex watches for every crewman. They had been engraved SAYONARA. MAXI WORLD CHAMPIONS. SARDINIA 1997 long before the racing began.

During that regatta’s penultimate race, Hasso Plattner’s Morning Glory was winning until the halyard that held its mainsail broke and the sail collapsed. Seizing on the opportunity, Sayonara, which had been in second place, took over the lead. For the rest of the race, it “covered” Morning Glory: whenever Morning Glory tacked, Sayonara also turned so that it always stood between its opponent and the finish line, making it virtually impossible for Plattner to regain the lead, even after his crew rigged a new halyard. Covering is standard racing procedure, but it infuriated Plattner. Even worse, by winning that day’s race, Sayonara clinched the championship. Ellison didn’t have to sail on the last day to win the regatta, and he decided not to. Plattner considered Ellison’s behavior unsportsmanlike. “I have only the worst English words to provide for them,” Plattner said later.

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.

A tall and gangly fifty-four-year-old, Kothe didn’t have much hair on the top of his head, although he did have a broad snow-white mustache and a goatee, which extended out over a long, pointy chin. He was relatively new to sailing. He had bought his first boat in 1997—the year he raced his first Hobart—but he believed he could make up for his lack of experience with the same sort of relentless striving that had made him a successful entrepreneur. Understanding the weather was the area where he believed he could make the biggest contribution to his crew’s race, and he spent the next three hours comparing the models, printing out charts and data while straining the largest of the coffee particles from his drink through his teeth.

It was obvious that he hadn’t been sailing for long. When he tried to pass himself off as an old salt, splicing nautical terms into the conversation, he ended up sounding more like a newcomer who was trying a bit too hard. The overall impression was that of a mad professor, and for that reason many CYC members called him Kooky Owner, or simply K.O. Some, in fact, had never heard his real name. For a while he tried to get the young men he recruited for his crew to stop using the name; later, he sought, again unsuccessfully, to alter the meaning by signing e-mails as “Kompetitive Owner.” The Sword’s crew eventually shortened the name to Kooky.

Kooky had an abiding hunger for the kind of glory that winning the Hobart could bring. “I was the smallest kid in school until I was nine, and I felt bad about that,” he said more than four decades later. “It gave me a point to prove.” He grew up in Eden, a port city south of Sydney where his father worked as an accountant for many of the fishing fleets based there. Although he didn’t sail as a child, Kooky spent a lot of time hanging around the docks and he remembered following the Hobart races. Two days before the 1954 race, when Kooky was eight, his parents gave him a new radio. “I listened to the whole race. Back then I could recite the names of everyone who had won.”

Kooky had been deeply committed to adding his name to that list ever since.

Kooky was fundamentally different from other skippers. Whereas most of them had been sailing for many years, he hoped to go from novice to Hobart winner almost immediately. And although sailing is a team sport, Kooky, who knew less about sailing than everyone else on his crew, wasn’t a natural leader. A true entrepreneur, most of his achievements had come from individual pursuits rather than group efforts, and his drive wasn’t matched by a talent for managing others. For example, after he hired Darren Senogles, a twenty-eight-year-old sailor known as Dags, to take care of the boat, Kooky called him so frequently that Dags told him, “If you keep calling me, I’ll never have a chance to get anything done.”

When he recruited his crew, Kooky didn’t mislead anyone about his sailing credentials. Instead, he talked about how he had flown gliders in airborne regattas over Australian deserts when he was working as a pharmacist near Canberra in the 1970s. “In gliding, you figure out what the wind is doing, and you win by learning how to take advantage of it, just like in sailing,” he said. “It’s the solo version of the same thing.” He also described gliding as an extremely competitive sport, recalling that one of his friends had been killed in a collision and claiming that midair contact sometimes left planes with tire marks on their wings.

Since those pharmacist days, Kooky’s career had evolved through a sequence of oddly logical stages. Pharmacology got him involved in animal tranquilizers, which led to tranquilizer guns. His understanding of the propulsion component inspired him to manufacture lifeline-throwing guns, which he profitably supplied to navies and merchant fleets around the world. After going through a divorce in 1992, Kooky decided his businesses were doing well enough that he could finally find the time to pursue the Hobart. For a couple of years, he crewed on other people’s boats, but since his dream had everything to do with winning the race on his own yacht, he soon bought a forty-foot sloop and joined the CYC.

Before the 1997 Hobart, he told his crew—which included Dags—that he would buy a better boat if they did well. They did, and the day after they finished the race, Kooky, always an early riser, began stalking the docks to shop for a new boat at 5:00 A.M. Before the morning was over, he had decided to buy Brighton Star for $220,000. It had originally been launched as the Sword of Orion, and Kooky decided to restore its former name.

The Sword’s shape was very different from that of classic sailing yachts. Its bow dropped straight down from the deck to the water. The back half of the boat was strikingly broad, creating a large cockpit area eight feet across. A seven-foot-diameter steering wheel extended from one side to the other, enabling helmsmen to have the broadest possible perspective. Like Sayonara and most of the fastest racing yachts, the hull was composed of strong but lightweight skins on the inside and outside, surrounding an interior of foam. The Sword’s skins were made of Kevlar, a synthetic material so strong that it’s used to make bulletproof vests.

Kooky went to fairly extreme measures to improve the boat and its crew. The Sword came with a handsome barometer, which was housed in a brass case; Kooky replaced it with a plastic one to eliminate a couple of pounds of weight. He had hinges moved from one side of the cabinet doors to the other because he thought shifting the weight of the hinges toward the front of the boat might improve the yacht’s handicap rating. If something broke in a race, he was pleased: “Now we can get a better one” was his usual reaction.

Beyond a demanding racing schedule—at least two races and one practice sail every week, sometimes with a professional sailing coach on board—Kooky used e-mails to badger the crew to be on the boat on time and even to exercise more and lose weight. “I’ve been looking closely at crew commitment,” he wrote in an all-crew message a month before the Hobart. “If you want to be on the Hobart boat, this is the commitment needed: 1) You will need to be available for all races from this weekend. No weekends off. Not for discussion. However, there will be a maximum of two midweek practice sessions, possibly only one. 2) Fitness. If you are not already, start running or go to the gym. Cut the alcohol and eat better. Lard is a penalty. 3) Smoking. Last weekend I saw cigarette ash land on sails and I suffered a coughing fit from cigarette smoke. There will be no smoking during short races, from the ten-minute gun. Before and between races, smoking sites will be per long races. In long races, there will be no smoking upwind, ahead of the traveler. In long races, there will be no smoking downwind, behind the cockpit. If you are not able to meet these conditions tell me now while you still have time to find a place on another boat going south.”

Kooky didn’t know any other way. “I’m just an intensely competitive person,” he would say. “I don’t do anything by halves.”

The Hobart has two kinds of winners. Larry Ellison and George Snow hoped to make it to Hobart first to win “line honors”: to be the first to cross the finish line. Others, including Kooky, aspired to win the race based on “adjusted” or “corrected” time. As in golf, every yacht is given a handicap to make up for its different size, weight, and sails. Although Kooky brought an uneven set of skills to his campaign, he rated his chances at winning on corrected time at one in six.

After he finished checking the weather information on his computer, Kooky took a cab for the fifteen-minute ride to the CYC, where he arrived just after eight o’clock. The clubhouse and the docks behind it were already packed with sailors, spectators, and journalists. Kooky’s first objective was to find Dags, who in addition to preparing the boat was one of the core members of the crew. Dags could hardly have been more different from his boss. While Kooky was physically and socially awkward, Dags had the wiry body of a long-distance runner and was a gifted athlete who exuded easygoing personal warmth. Though he looked like an up-and-coming corporate attorney when he wore his wire-rimmed glasses, when he was drinking beer with his contemporaries, he was exuberantly playful and seemed, if anything, younger than his age. But Dags managed the Sword like a seasoned executive, systematically testing equipment and attending to his “to do” list. He was also uncommonly generous. After a long day of sailing during a weeklong regatta, he stayed on the boat much longer than anyone else, cleaning up and getting ready for the next day. By the time he arrived at the house where the crew were staying, he had missed dinner. No one had thought to save any lasagna for him; rather than complaining, he began washing the dishes.

Like Kooky, Dags had high ambitions for the Sword, but the nature of his aspirations was fundamentally different. Dags was less interested in glory than in becoming a great sailor for its own sake. He was a bowman, responsible for changing the sails in front of the mast. Because the bow is more affected by the motion of waves than any other part of the boat, the job requires acrobatic balance and enough dexterity to manipulate a complicated array of lines, sails, and equipment. Dags was a natural.

He hoped the Sword would be a stepping-stone to even more competitive yachts. It was not his first boat: he started racing to Hobart when he was just fourteen, and he had already competed in ten races. Now Dags wanted to find out whether he had the skills to sail at the very highest level—in the Whitbread or the America’s Cup or on a boat like Sayonara—and he was willing to sacrifice a lot to get there. A few months earlier, he had quit working at his father’s home-building company because it was getting in the way.

Dags sailed on the Sword almost in spite of its owner. There’s often an implicit bargain between owners and crewmen. Talented sailors want to be on high-performance yachts, which are necessarily expensive. By providing a first-class boat and covering the ongoing expense of acquiring new sails and the latest in performance-enhancing equipment, owners attract crewmen who can’t afford their own boats. The other part of the equation is that much of the recognition, as well as the trophies, goes to the owners.

“He’s just a glory hound—that’s all he wants,” Dags said of Kooky. But if the glory came from racing victories, Dags would also benefit. A few months before the Hobart, the Sword was the surprise winner of a major regatta. If it continued to do well, Dags would be invited to join an even better yacht.

Still, better than anyone, Dags understood that Kooky wasn’t a perfect skipper and that the owner’s lack of experience and follow-through were problematic. A couple of weeks earlier, Dags had asked every member of the crew to help provision the boat with food and drink and various other supplies. Kooky’s task had been to refill the propane tank that was used for cooking, but when the two met on the dock on the morning of the race, Dags wasn’t surprised to learn that the tank was still sitting in a locker, virtually empty. That’s typical, Dags said to himself. Here we are, with just a few hours before the start, and I have to run around trying to fill the propane tank instead of checking everything on the boat one last time.

Larry Ellison paid whatever it took to get the world’s best sailors on Sayonara. Kooky avoided making outright payments; Dags was paid to take care of the boat, but he sailed on his own time. Like many owners, however, Kooky used his buying power with marine suppliers to bolster his team. A sailmaker named Andrew Parkes started sailing on the Sword after Kooky told him, “I’m going to be buying a lot of sails, and I would like you to be part of my crew.”

A month before the Hobart, Kooky had met Glyn Charles, an Olympic sailor from Britain, and asked him to join the crew. A boyishly handsome thirty-three-year-old with a mop of curly dark hair, Glyn had been in Australia for several weeks working as a sailing coach. Since he hoped to represent Britain in the Sydney Olympics, he was also spending time sailing small boats back and forth across the harbor in order to develop an intimate understanding of local wind patterns. Small boats were Glyn’s passion. They were what attracted him to sailing, and unlike many sailors who move to bigger boats as their skills increase, Glyn reveled in the total control he could have over a small one. At the time, he was ranked fourth in the world for the Star Class, a twenty-two-and-a-half-foot two-man boat.

Although he had been planning to leave Australia on December 22 so he could spend Christmas in England with his family and girlfriend, he agreed to meet Kooky at the CYC bar ten days before the race. Kooky loved the idea of adding an Olympic-quality helmsman to his crew. Glyn didn’t like ocean racing, in part because he was prone to seasickness, but he was tempted: he could add the Hobart to his sailing résumé—and also make some money. He asked for one thousand pounds. Kooky started out saying that he couldn’t pay an outright fee. While it was permitted in the class in which Sayonara sailed, it wasn’t in the Sword’s. A little later, though, he offered to reimburse Glyn for various expenses, including his flight to England, and to pay about a thousand pounds for some “consulting work.”

Glyn was still torn. The Hobart sounded a lot like the Fastnet Race, Britain’s best-known ocean race, which starts from the Isle of Wight and goes to the southwest tip of Ireland and then back to England. Glyn had sailed in the Fastnet, and had hated it. On the other hand, he was having a hard time turning sailing into a profession, so he ultimately accepted Kooky’s offer.

But two days before the race, Glyn thought he had made a terrible mistake. He was hit by a stomach virus, and all he could think about was the misery of seasickness. Even though he hadn’t left land, he already felt seasick. When Kooky heard that Glyn was ill, he phoned and told him, “You’ve got to go to the doctor and get it fixed. If it’s a virus, it’s going to go right through the crew.”

Glyn replied, “It’s only food.”

“I hope you’re right. If it’s food, you’ll be all right—but you’ve got to see a doctor.” Afraid that Glyn wasn’t taking him seriously, Kooky added, “If by eight o’clock tonight you haven’t told me that you’ve gotten clearance from a doctor, you’re off the boat. Simple as that. I can’t risk it.”

Later that day, Glyn called Kooky and said he’d been to a doctor and that he was okay.

On the morning of the race, Kooky asked Glyn about the specifics of what the doctor had said. Glyn had a confession to make: he hadn’t actually seen a doctor. Instead, he had talked by phone to a friend who was a physician. Kooky was annoyed, but Glyn, in part because of his enthusiastic mood, convinced him that he felt much better.

By midmorning, the docks were bustling with last-minute activity. Several yachtsmen were high above the decks of their boats, sitting in bosun’s chairs—small, slinglike seats suspended from the tops of masts—checking the rigging. Other sailors were disconnecting electrical cords, removing flags from the tops of masts, folding sails, and off-loading half-empty bottles of wine. Some crews were huddling in their cockpits with maps and the rules for the race. Others were putting on their team shirts and hats and asking passersby to take pictures. Some of the yachtsmen were nervous, but none of them showed it.

Before the Sword left the dock to head toward the starting line, Kooky joined the rest of the ten-member crew for a round of rum and Cokes at the CYC’s main bar. Sailors are renowned for their capacity to drink, and theirs may be the only sport in which having a drink or two before the start of competition is not merely acceptable but, for some, de rigueur. Although it was still morning, the bar was packed—and the mood was raucous, like a Saturday night in a college pub. Since girlfriends and wives were part of the crowd, there wasn’t much discussion about the ominous weather forecast. Instead, most of the talk was about Christmas Day activities and the impossible pressures of simultaneously preparing for the race and celebrating the holiday. Beyond lighthearted ribbing and challenges, there was a steady chorus of “good luck, mate” and “see you in Hobart.” Kooky—who, like skippers of many of the other most competitive yachts, had banned alcohol from the Sword—explained his morning cocktail with a pharmacist’s sense of humor. “We might as well have a small sedative to settle our nerves.” Dags had two.

On most yachts, the skipper delivers a pep talk before the start of the race. After the Sword’s crew assembled back on the boat, the only inspirational words came from Steve Kulmar, another relatively recent addition to the crew. Although he was brought on as a principal helmsman, Kulmar, who ran a successful Sydney advertising agency, had a far more expansive idea as to the role he would play on the Sword. Indeed, since he considered himself the yacht’s most experienced crewman, he expected to make most of the big decisions. That Kooky was the skipper seemed to Kulmar an irrelevant detail.

Kulmar always provoked strong reactions. People either loved him or hated him; he left no room for middle ground. A solidly built forty-six-year-old with closely cropped hair that was halfway to gray, he looked a bit like a stern version of Frank Sinatra. While Kulmar’s eyes weren’t blue, they were distinctive, usually so wide open that they looked as if they were about to burst from their sockets. In the office, where he wore Armani suits and his secretary served him oversized cups of cappuccino, Kulmar’s demeanor veered between toughness and vulnerability. He could be charming and solicitous, qualities that helped his company attract a blue-chip list of clients. The way he hesitated in the middle of a thought made him sound like an intellectual, yet his haircut and intensity gave him the appearance of a military officer and a man who was always on the verge of erupting into a tantrum if anything went wrong. Those tantrums weren’t pretty: Kulmar had a towering ego, and even his closest friends complained about the way he tried to seize control of every situation and how he stamped his feet when he failed to get his way.

Before the Sword left the dock, Kulmar addressed the crew as if it were his own. “The yacht is in great shape. We have an excellent crew, and I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t win as long as we push the boat as hard as we can.” His monologue included references to his past victories. In fact, he did have a great record. As a child, he had won several Australian and world championships on twelve- and eighteen-foot boats. As an adult, he had sailed in seven Fastnets and seventeen Hobarts, three of them on boats that won on corrected time. But Dags thought Kulmar’s credential wielding was more than simple egotism. He thought it was part of an effort by Kulmar to take over the boat. And that, Dags thought, was deeply troubling.

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.”

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.

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.

8

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

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,

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