Sydney to Hobart in a boat

On boxing day 2004 I sailed in the Sydney Hobart yacht race. I tell this story quite often in my keynotes and the weather was particularly terrible (as per the video above) but there are a few details that I gloss over. The first is that we were on a cruising yacht not a racing yacht. The main difference is that we don’t need to sit out on the edge of the boat getting wet, we sit inside a nice dry and relatively warm coach house.

The second significant different was that because we were on a cruising yacht we were allowed to use our engine though technically we were penalised for doing so. The truth was we used our engine a lot as the boat we were on didn’t do a great job of sailing into the wind and my dad (who was the captain) was adamant that we would make it to Hobart regardless…and ideally in time for the New Years celebrations. Ultimately the amount we used the engine didn’t matter as we were the only cruising boat that finished the race and so we won our division by default.

I also think that people imagine we were eating freeze dried food our noodle cups but no. As soon as we were outside Sydney heads we threw a line over the side and picked up a yellowfin tuna (we caught another heading down the Tassie coast). My brother Matt spent a number of years working on tuna farms out of Port Lincoln in South Australia so he did a pretty ace job of cooking us up some marinated sashimi and rice.

Finally, the biggest thing I gloss over from the race was how seasick I was. It’s a little embarrassing because I come a family of professional fisherman even though I know it’s not something you can control. I tried really hard to pretend I wasn’t feeling sick because I thought I was meant to be tougher (or something like that) but for anyone who’s ever tried to pretend to no be seasick, it really isn’t easy.