The Proving Ground: The Inside Story of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Boat Race. Bruce Knecht

      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.

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      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,