Fatal Storm by Rob Mundle Page A

carried more than 35,000 competitors. Considering the extreme dangers, it was remarkable that only two sailors had died as a result of injuries suffered aboard their respective boats. Incredibly no one had been lost overboard and not recovered – a fact that many saw as evidence of solid safety procedures and rigid race organisation – plus an occasional dose of good fortune.
    The most remarkable stories of survival came out of the 1993 event – one of the toughest on record beforethe 1998 race. A southerly gale with winds gusting up to 50 knots and a fast-flowing opposing current combined to whip up mountainous waves off the NSW south coast. Conditions were so severe that of the 104 yachts that started, only 38 finished.
    Around midnight on the second night a huge breaking wave overwhelmed the 35-foot sloop MEM. The yacht capsized and owner–skipper John Quinn was hurled into the sea after the sheer force of the broken water caused his safety harness to break. Quinn surfaced and was faced with the horror of seeing his yacht sailing away. The crew knew he was overboard and were desperately searching, but they could not see him. Other race yachts and ships rushed to the area to search but Quinn was rated as having very little chance of surviving in the horrendous conditions. Every 15 minutes or so a colossal breaking wave more than 40-feet high would sweep through the area, so powerful that it would hurl a man around like a soggy rag doll. After four unsuccessful hours of searching, the worst was feared. Race officials discussed writing his obituary. They were unaware Quinn, aided by a light buoyancy vest, was still alive and was duck-diving under each immense breaking wave.
    “The only time I really started to get a bit desperate was right at the end and that was for a very short period of time,” Quinn said. “At that stage the buoyancy vest I was wearing was losing some of its buoyancy and I was starting to take water and get tired. A while later, as I rode to the top of one big wave, I saw it – the most beautiful Christmas tree you have ever seen. It was a bloody big ship with all lights blazing coming ever so slowly towards me. At one moment I thought the ship was going to pass without anyone spotting me because it was coming down the drift at an angle and the stern, where all the lookouts were gathered on the bridge andusing searchlights, was the most distant point from me. My heart began to sink.
    “Then a big wave picked up the stern and knocked it sideways towards where I was. Suddenly the ship was right there, just metres away. I started to yell my lungs out ‘Hey, hey, hey!’ I shouted. Brent Shaw, who was manning a searchlight, first heard my yells then spotted me. He was fantastic. After hearing me shout he got the searchlight on me and started to shout out ‘I’ve got you. I can see you.’”
    While the searchlight was trained on Quinn, the race yacht Atara , which was just astern and damaged but still searching, moved in to drag him aboard. It had been five freezing hours since he’d fallen overboard. He was 50 miles offshore.
    There was a wry link between this incident and the very first Sydney to Hobart. John Quinn’s father Harry had bought Rani from Captain Illingworth soon after it won the first race and in 1959 he had taken John and two family friends on a fishing trip to Port Stephens, north of Sydney. A storm moved in so they anchored Rani off the deserted Broughton Island and went ashore to spend the night in an old fisherman’s hut. Battered by the fierce waves, Rani dragged its anchor that night and was wrecked on a coastal beach a few miles away. With no sign of survivors an aerial search was mounted and eventually the four were spotted on Broughton Island, but with conditions so severe, they had to wait four days to be rescued by a boat.
    The 1993 Quinn incident brought yet another review of race safety standards and search and rescue operations. Yet again it was the Hobart race