Blue Water Warriors: The Early Sydney to Hobart Yacht Races

By Craig Harris, Marsden Hordern and John Bertrand

Blue Water Warriors tells the story of the early Sydney to Hobart yacht races. Drawing on log books and memories of the navigator on a legendary competing yacht, a living part of Australia’s maritime history. 

The Mistral II’s crew encountered dangers and hazards not generally faced by today’s compe

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charris Publishing
• Release date: Aug 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780645379617

Craig Harris

Craig Harris has taught, written about, photographed, and played music for more than four decades. His most recent book is Bluegrass, Newgrass, Old-Time, and Americana Music. He hosts The Craig Harris Show, a weekly radio show out of Washington, DC.

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www.charrispublishing.com

BLUE WATER WARRIORS

© Craig Harris 2018

First printed August 2018 by Lightning Source

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.

Cover photo Marsden Hordern collection

Artwork and Design by Green Hill Publishing

Contents

Acknowledgements

Sources of Information

Index

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

William Arthur Ward

Foreword

Blue Water Warriors is a book about racing in days gone by where safety was considered a by-word only. It is a portrayal of sailing on a large schooner, Mistral ll, in some of the early Sydney to Hobart yacht races. Although compared to the maxi yachts of today, Mistral ll was in fact quite small.

When I skippered Australia ll to victory in 1983, in the America’s Cup, the innovation of the yacht was absolutely cutting edge. We had the famous Ben Lexcen designed winged keel, kept in a shroud of secrecy, that allowed us to outfox Dennis Connor and the crew of Liberty. Australia ll is now archaic when compared to Emirates Team New Zealand that won the America’s Cup in June 2017. In 10 knots of wind, Australia 11 would sail at 8 knots. We thought that was fast. The new generation of foiling America’s Cup boats in 10 knots of wind sail at 40 knots!

In comparison the technology of 1947 was extremely rudimentary; all sails were manually hoisted and trimmed making sail changes difficult, especially on a two masted schooner.

...in the high paced world of yachting - the only constant is change!

The book is from the memories of Marsden Hordern the navigator aboard the yachts Mistral ll and later White Cloud. Sailing in the early years of these races was a far greater challenge than many of today’s sailors could imagine. The book reveals the high risks taken, the sailors lack of safety awareness in an era where Australia was recovering from World War ll. It still amazes me that these sailors embarked on a journey without radio contact or communications and if they had a serious incident they had to save themselves – if not they perished!

As you read into the book you will relive numerous white knuckle incidents. There was rivalry between Mistral ll and Morna. Morna was a very successful boat winning on many occasions. The descriptive passages within the book give a sensation that you are sitting on the deck riding along with the crew.

I was glad to hear that this book was written. I feel it is important to record and preserve the history of this classic ocean sailing event. Surprisingly there a very few books written about the race and to have an on board account of many early races is extremely rare. It becomes obvious that author Craig Harris has spent countless hours researching during the development of the book. The facts and information within the book will serve as a valuable historical reference of the race. The details from the original log books, photos and newspaper clippings are well woven into a story that makes the book compelling to read.

I am delighted that Craig Harris has dedicated himself to providing a rare and entertaining memoir of this famous race.

John Bertrand AO

Preface

Marsden Hordern is a remarkable man. He is over halfway through his tenth decade, is in good health and has a sharp memory. His life, especially in his early years, was spent learning to sail and serving in the Royal Australian Navy as an officer commanding small ships. His passion for sailing continued after the war, when he sailed in several Sydney to Hobart races. Many of his other work commitments, interests and hobbies are portrayed within this book. He was an avid pilot, flying Tiger Moths, and studied the early Australian maritime explorers. In later life, Marsden’s passion for maritime history earned him an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Sydney, along with many awards for his published books.

Marsden’s beloved grandfather impressed upon him to record all aspects of his life and preserve his personal history. During the war, he kept a diary which, after his retirement, was transcribed into a book. He kept accurate logbooks of the Sydney to Hobart races in a ‘borrowed’ (or re-located) blank naval log book.

Several years ago, Marden’s children and I urged him to expand his notes into a book. He answered, ‘I’m an old man; I haven’t got time for this; I am writing my life story and other submissions for naval journals’. At the same time, he recognised that his notes and collected materials were extremely valuable and should be published. He happily passed these on to the family and me to complete. I inherited the task! He has been very generous with his time in answering my many questions either in person or by email. Some of the emailed responses have been extremely detailed, reflecting his fantastic memory and showing his deep passion for the Sydney to Hobart race.

Marsden happily passed on all of his original logs, photos, many newspaper articles and memorabilia to allow me to start the research for this book. There is fascinating and unique material never before printed or seen. He is keen to see this historical part of ‘the race’ presented. All the events and incidents occurred and I have not needed to invent material; I felt it was my task to relate all these events into a story form. I am confident that Marsden will enjoy this story, will smile, but may not like how some of the content is portrayed − although I am sure that, like you the reader, he will enjoy the journey down memory lane.

Many fine books have been written about the various people who were involved in the Sydney-Hobart. These include Fast swimming fish: Kurrewa (Wild & Woolley, 2005) the story of Frank and John Livingstone; Maritime reflections (Sandy Bay, 1991) concerning Jock Muir, and Ragamuffin man (Black Inc. 2016), which recalls the experience of Syd Fischer. Several books have been published on the tragic events of 1998. I believe there is no other book that provides the unique experience of ‘living aboard’ and shares some of the highs and lows of the sport in the early days.

I did not completely understand the enormity of the project when I started. I soon adopted the approach ‘…that it is possible to eat an elephant, providing you do it one bite at a time’. Determination and commitment are two of the critical tools needed for writing a book.

The research side of the project was at times frustrating although sometimes, after many dead ends, you turn the page and amazing information appears. Unfortunately, the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia has not kept detailed records of the early days and their archiving is poor. I hope that some of the research I have undertaken will be valuable resource material for them.

Many of the photos some people will consider to be of low quality. Compared to today’s imagery, this would be correct. During these early years, cameras were not a common item and photos were taken on rolls of film. Once all the shots had been taken on the roll, they had to be developed, which was quite expensive. The most common camera during this era was the Kodak box camera. Some of the photographs within this book are nearly 70 years old and the years are not always kind. Please appreciate that some of the aerial photos were taken by the pilot while he was holding the aircraft joystick between his knees and looking through a small viewfinder to focus on the object.

I have learned so much about this race, the yachts and the people of the era and for that I am better educated and wiser. I hope some of this rubs off onto you, the reader.

I was fortunate enough to sit on the balcony of a cruise ship for a few days while working on this book. I would often gaze out to sea and contemplate the vastness of the ocean and the braveness and tenacity of the sailors in the early days. They truly were ‘blue water warriors’.

Craig Harris

June 2018

Introduction

Outward Bound

I was a yachtsman competing in the Sydney to Hobart race over 70 years ago. I am still alive today, in 2018, to relate my story. There was no way, back then, to imagine today’s race, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent and where many have a win-at-all-cost attitude. This has evolved from humble days, where a group of sailors went for a sail in a competitive but gentlemanly way to become the talk of the nation.

I couldn’t have dreamt of a yacht completing the journey in one day and nine hours like Comanche did in 2017. That is an average speed of around nineteen knots. If Mistral ll achieved a speed of twelve knots for just a few minutes, we were scared – and bragged about it later after a few ales.

Can you imagine what is like to leave home the day after Christmas on a yacht sailing into the unknown? Sharing very confined quarters with fourteen other men – four-hour watches, hot-bunking, sleep-deprivation, to be summoned to the call of ‘all hands on deck’ at any time…?

We might be confronted with small dramas or large dramas, mostly unpredictable. Every individual’s competitive nature pushes the human as well as the machine to the limit – making for a stressful few days.

Can you visualise the deck being swamped with large waves and being sopping wet for countless hours, the salt stinging your eyes and the taste of seawater mixing with your saliva? Do you know what it’s like to be on a constant rollercoaster – up and down every few minutes and, worst of all, being seasick or watching and nursing someone who is? Or being without the ability to communicate your location – and whether or not you’re okay?

We’d experienced all of that by 2300 on Boxing Day, 1947, a short twelve hours after leaving Sydney, with another five or six days to go. They proved to be long, gruelling, frustrating – and rewarding. In the calm of that next morning, we watched the grey skies turn into the softest of pinks, white fluffs of clouds with a subtle hint of purple emerging on the horizon. We listened to squawking seabirds, observed large whales, acrobatic dolphins, and frolicking seals all interacting with us as if we were new-found friends. This was our introduction to the coming sunrise. It reminded us that we loved sailing.

Fast forward to New Year’s Eve, with the scent of victory strong in our nostrils – and then a swift reversal of fortunes leading to probable death and destruction on the unforgiving rocks and cliffs of Tasman Island.

We had been punished by strong gales and angry seas before sailing for several hours in easier conditions, pushed by a fresh and brisk northerly wind along the eastern side of Tasman Island. All we had to do was pass the island’s sheer cliffs, round the corner into Storm Bay, followed by a quick run up to the Iron Pot and on to the finish line.

As Mistral II’s navigator, I proposed to the skipper a plan to alter our approach to the island which would take us wide, about three miles off the coast. The wind was blowing offshore from Tasman Island and I argued that the high cliffs would create a wind shadow, affecting our speed. In a worst case scenario, we would be becalmed.

The skipper responded, ‘Why waste precious minutes when we are possibly in the lead? The water close to the cliffs is deep and we should sail in close and cut the corner’. After much discussion, the skipper finally decided: ‘We’re in front and I don’t want to lose the lead. We’ll take the shortest route’.

It was the second time in twenty-four hours we had faced the end of the story for Mistral II – and for ourselves. Yet I went on to participate in a total of four Sydney to Hobart yacht races, sailing on Mistral II in 1947, 1948 and 1950 and White Cloud in 1954.

During the races, I kept personal log books in narrative form. This edited transcript is my story of the races, as well as an account of our time in Tasmania and of the return voyages. It was generally written hastily on the spot and some words used are unfamiliar today. The stories vary for each event, as the log books reveal. They’re also reflective of the amount of time I had available to write.

As was usual at the time, we used imperial measurements. Conversions can be found in the glossary.

Marsden Hordern

as told to Craig Harris

Rivenhall, Warrawee

April 2018

Chapter 1

In the beginning

Things were very different when I sailed my first Sydney-Hobart race in 1947. But before I talk about that, let us look briefly at what has happened to the race since then.

It began as an exclusive, private, gentleman’s sport; very competitive but also leisurely-paced. It has grown into a mega-international event, intimately associated with advertising and big business and patronised by billionaires.

In 1945, there were no crowds to farewell the nine small boats as they left Sydney Harbour on a voyage which might take them a thousand miles. One of the boats spent three nights in port, few observers knew where the yachts were at any given time and the winner took six days and fourteen hours to reach Hobart – a far cry from the record one day, nine hours, fifteen minutes and twenty four seconds set by the maxi yacht Comanche in 2017.

By 1948, the entries had doubled and Claude Plowman – who had twice before crossed the finishing line first in his tall-masted cutter Morna – won the event and was knighted by His Majesty King George VI for services to sailing and the Sydney to Hobart race in particular. The event began to catch the public’s imagination and by 1956, when 28 boats left Sydney, they were waved off by about 100,000 well-wishers crowded along the harbour foreshores plus 2000 more on the water in vessels of all kinds.

In the early days of the race, it was generally started by a random yachting official but, from 1956, the occasion was afforded more pomp and circumstance. Startline activities were graced with the presence of national identities such as the New South Wales governors Sir Eric Woodward and Sir Roden Cutler VC, Prime Minister Robert Menzies, Sir Frank Packer and the Chief Justice, Sir Garfield Barwick.

The character of the race changed too, with entrants from all over the world – the United States, Britain, New Zealand, South Africa and Italy, to name a few. In 1969, seventeen teams were from overseas and one of them, Morning Cloud, was skippered by Ted Heath, Leader of the Opposition in the UK House of Commons – who won the race on handicap.

Yacht design was also evolving. Synthetic sails, roller reefing and hydraulic, electric or hand-powered winches had largely replaced the canvas sails with their reefing points and blocks and tackles. Among the 92 boats in the 1973 event was the yacht Helsal, built from ferro-cement. She went on to take line honours.

Costs, too, were soaring. For the first time, in 1975, there were more than 100 entries and one of them, Kialoa lll, was said to have cost over a million dollars, taking line honours in a record elapsed time of two days, fourteen hours and 37 minutes.

Hitachi was appointed the major commercial sponsor in 1976, upsetting one of the founding members of the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia (CYCA), Peter Luke, who was also one of four original members awarded life membership. Luke resigned from the club in protest at what he saw as a conflict between commercialism and what he believed to be the principals of the sailing club. In his letter to the Committee, he wrote: ‘…Gentlemen, you have committed the unpardonable crime; here is my life membership card. Thank you. Good bye’.

1984 proved to be a bad year, with a typical Bass Strait blow striking the fleet. A sailor was swept to his death from the deck of Yahoo ll and, by the end of the second day, 70 of the 150 competitors had retired. By 1989, the Japanese hoped to win the race with Marishten (which was forced to retire). The following year, the $15 million British entry Rothmans provoked controversy as a perceived advertisement for the tobacco giant and there was speculation about what sort of a welcome she would receive in Hobart. One of the rules of the race banned advertising on sails and the situation was provoked by photographs of Rothmans flying a spinnaker which blatantly advertised the company. Rothmans crossed the finishing line first – but for this breach was stripped of her claim to line honours and relegated to ninth place. In 1991, in a move deplored by many, the CYCA altered the rules to allow advertising on both sails and hulls.

One hundred and three competitors competed in the disastrous 1993 race when another Bass Strait blow hit hard. Such weather had been familiar to seasoned sailors such as Cook, Bass and Flinders who had crossed those seas in sturdier ships, with ballast steadying their stout hulls. Caught in such weather, they simply hove-to under a storm sail or two and rode out the gale. Almost 200 years later, just two days out from Sydney, the yacht Clwyd lost its slender keel, capsized and sank – and, by the end of the next day, 65 yachts had retired from the race.

Three hundred and seventy-one yachts with 4000 crew started in the 1994 race with an estimated fleet value of $100 million – to some an astronomical sum. But now a single boat, such as Sayonara, is valued at $6 million.

Another weather event devastated the 1998 fleet. When Winston Churchill was abandoned, three of her crew drowned. Business Post Naiad capsized twice, her helmsman lost overboard. Her skipper died from a heart attack. The tally for the race was five yachts lost and six men dead; 55 fortunate others were winched to safety by rescue helicopters.

On 23 December, 2011, The Weekend Australian newspaper headlined an article on the coming race ‘All the Comforts of home when Alchemy lll sets sail for Hobart’. It read:

When sailors get together and recount their experiences in the Rolex Sydney-Hobart race, it is generally a slew of horror stories…But there are always exceptions to the rule and Hobart businessman Jarrod Ritchie and his mates are hoping to remember their second Hobart race as anything but horrid.

The article went on to note that Alchemy lll, a Beneteau 57, and the largest cruising yacht made by the giant French boat manufacturer, looked ‘more like a floating five-star apartment than a racing yacht’. Alchemy lll was lavishly equipped with four cabins, each with its own en-suite, a ‘huge and comfortable saloon’, the latest battery-operated machines for making fresh water and ice, air-conditioning, ducted heating, an oven, microwave, refrigerators, a deep freeze and winches to hoist and furl sails. There was no mention of a cook but her crew were expecting to eat well. Her 39-year-old owner had arranged for a gourmet chef in Hobart to prepare individual meals which would be deep-frozen and heated up when any one felt hungry.

On Christmas Eve, the paper ran a double page spread on the yacht Hugo Boss under the headline ‘Wild Child of the Fleet’:

It’s the cool kid of the Rolex Sydney-to-Hobart race, a radical ocean racer which is ready to take on the old salts and kick spray into the faces of the bigger Maxis…This is ocean racing with added sex appeal – a 60-footer which can ride the waves like an 18-foot skiff…surfing never looked so good.

On 31 December, 2011, The Weekend Australian commented on the close finish between the maxi yachts Wild Oats XI and Investic Loyal, observing that Wild Oats XI had cost more than $10 million, including her mainsail at $280,000, continuing:

…then there is the cost of hiring professional sailors to race these beasts. Many of the crew on boats such as Wild Oats… are highly-skilled mercenaries.

Three years later, on 30 December, 2014, The Australian reporter Sue Neales wrote a controversial piece on how sponsorship was ruining the race. The article drew connections between the public’s waning interest in the Sydney to Hobart and other major sailing events and the funding from