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

The story of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart boat race – the most dramatic in yacht racing history

The waters between Sydney and Hobart are famously treacherous. No one is fooled by the clear skies. In the hours before the 1998 Sydney to Hobart race, skippers gathered for a weather briefing. An intense low pressure was predicted, but three different forecasts disagreed about the exact course of the stormy weather. No one was unduly alarmed and all decided to sail. But within hours the yachts were confronted with hurricane-force winds and waves the height of a five-storey building. Six sailors died; fifty-five were pulled from the water. Of the 115 boats that started, just 43 would finish. In Hobart a memorial service replaced the legendary parties that normally follow the race. By focussing on a handful of yachts and those who crewed them, Bruce Knecht brilliantly recreates those dramatic hours and the stomach wrenching fear of those caught in the eye of the storm, battling, some forlornly, for their lives.

The worst disaster in recent ocean racing history began the day after Christmas 1998 on a postcard-perfect day in Sydney Harbour. One hundred and fifteen yachts gathered for the start of 630-mile race that would take them across one of the world's most trecerous bodies of water and on to Hobart, on Tasmania's rugged east coast, the December sky was a brilliant blue, and spectators crowded along the shore to cheer as the boats set off. Less than twenty-four hours later, the fleet would be shredded by hurricane-force winds and battered by eighty-foot waves. When it was all over, men would be dead, boats would be lost, and those who survived would be changed forever.

The Proving Ground is a gripping account of what happened, focusing on three yachts with a cast of characters straight out of a novel. there was Sayonara, owned by Larry Ellison, the world's second-richest man – a restless soul with an almost patholigical need to win. His crew included Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert's heir apparent, a twenty-seven-year-old with an inexplicable taste for danger. On the Word of Orion, a pharmacist entrepreneur hoped to fulfil a childhood dream even though it would require him to make a sudden leap from sailng novice to grand prix yachtsman – a leap that would end in disaster. On the Winston Churchill, a classic wooden yacht that had competed i the very first Sydeny to Hovart Race fifty-three years earlier, the crew included a nineteen-year-old whose friends called him Beaver, an investment banker, and a garbage collector. Before the race was over, the Winston Churchill was no more.

A page-turner of the highest order, The Proving Ground is more than one of the most exciting adventure stories to have been written in years. It is also an incisive look at the forces that continue to draw men who have triumphed on land to risk everything at sea.