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.
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