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when a southerly buster hit us. Illingworth, we heard later, had reefed down and forereached Rani through it. He just refused to take any of the gear off her. His attitude was ‘we will only have to put it back on again’. We reefed down and nursed our ship along in a very conservative fashion, and hove-to through that gale. Some of the boats actually put into the south coast ports. The crews of Saltair and Abermerle are supposed to have spent time ashore shooting rabbits and going to the movies.
    “Illingworth just kept plugging away. He was out of radio contact for quite a few days and at one stage we all presumed he’d been lost. Well, of course, the rest is history. Illingworth won by a day. We were still mooching down the Tassie coast when we heard that he had suddenly popped up in Storm Bay. When we got right up into the Derwent there was a tremendous north-westerly gale. It blew 74 knots and really knocked the fleet about. We had a triple reefed main, a jib and a mizzen. But within a quarter of a mile of the line the breeze suddenly dropped and the Derwent was as flat as a millpond. It wasn’t worth putting all that gear back on again so we just concentrated on getting across the finish. We came in third just behind Winston Churchill. We learned a few tricks from that first race and when I went down the following year as mate in Bob Bull’s Christina , we pulled out all stops and we won.”
    Illingworth’s remarkable effort in ploughing on through the worst of the gale and trouncing his opponents stimulated an enormous tide of public interest in the future of the event. Australian Power Boat and Yachting Monthly ’s report on the race noted: “The hope that an ocean race would be held annually was expressed at a civic reception given by the Lord Mayor (Mr Soundy, MHA) at the Hobart Town Hall on January 8, 1946.”
    Responding to a speech by the Governor of Tasmania, Admiral Sir Hugh Binney, Captain Illingworth said he and his crew “had been deeply impressed by the welcome given them in Hobart, which was an ideal place at which to end an ocean race.”
    The race report continued: “The Cruising Yacht Club at Sydney and the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania had launched the sport of ocean racing on a firm basis. A next step was for an Australian yacht to visit Great Britain and ‘take the ashes away’. Every other branch of Australian sport had been represented in contests in Britain. The president of the CYC (Mr Walker), who sailed Saltair , said that nowhere else could yachtsmen have received a better welcome.”
    Walker was quoted as suggesting that when the next race was held it was likely to attract between 30 and 40 boats. “At no far distant time Australia should challenge the USA,” he said. “We have the men in Hobart now who can steer a boat as well as and better than Mr Vanderbilt [the famed America’s Cup defender].”
    The Sydney to Hobart was soon confirmed as an annual event and it took only a few years for it to be acclaimed as one of the world’s three “majors” in offshore racing – the others being the Fastnet Race out of England and America’s Newport to Bermuda. All three events demanded the highest level of skill and endurance, regardless of the conditions.
    In many respects the Sydney to Hobart is perhaps the greatest of them all. From the colourful start within thenatural amphitheatre that surrounds Sydney’s magnificent harbour, through to the finish at the waterfront dock area of the beautiful and historic city of Hobart, it is a race of guts, determination, majesty and splendour.
    The 630-mile course is seen to have four distinct and always challenging components. There is the unpredictable and often savage Tasman Sea off the NSW south coast; the notorious Bass Strait crossing between mainland Australia and the island state of Tasmania where wild winds and shallow water can compress waves into massively powerful, foaming liquid mountains; the challenging stretch down the