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  • Initiation rites: Doing your first Hobart and winning!

Initiation rites: Doing your first Hobart and winning!

Initiation rites:  Doing your first Hobart and winning!
Balmain Experience

Initiation rites: Doing your first Hobart and winning!

What do you do when you have one race for one divisional win. Do you quit with a perfect average or come back and try to do even better?

One long distance ocean race for one win! The question is, should 51-year-old Sydney sailing instructor Chris Wise quit while he’s ahead?

He can think about it as he flies back to Sydney on New Years’ Day – one and a half hours, basically along the rhumb line that he and the other seven members of Tony Williams’s Balmain Experience followed south for four days.

Think about the day and a half of being seasick. A night to remember somewhere in Bass Strait, at the helm, heart beating triple time as the boat raced down a double wave with the speed log hitting 17 knots.  A fellow crewman injured as the boom swung across the boat. Another crewmember, whose day job is a surgeon, applying his sewing skills on a torn spinnaker.

Also the camaraderie of sitting alongside the rest of the crew on the ‘rail’ rounding Tasman Island, and sensing victory. Nearing the finish and hearing calls of ‘well done’ from shore as they motor into Constitution Dock – three days, 22 hours, 27 minutes and 26 seconds after the start.  Thirty eighth across the line.

Sailing on board a 38-footer is a race of endurance – not a sprint like being on the bigger, faster thoroughbreds. Eight crew, four hours on watch, four hours off – until Tasman Island when they realized they were well-positioned and had a real chance of taking out the Performance Handicap Division. That helped extract an extra dollop of energy and commitment to bring the boat home.

“Tony pushed the boat but pushed it sensibly and it paid off for all of us,” said Chris, with the Kaufman/Juston designed 38-footer taking out the PHS Handicap Division, one of three in the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race.

Wise has been teaching sailing at the Pacific Sailing School for the past 10 years, and has students, like him, competing this year in their first Hobart race, as well as former students crewing on other boats in the fleet.

“I thought – why not me?”  Sailing since he was eight years old, encouraged by his mother Yvonne and a winner of State and national dinghy titles, Chris came to long-distance ocean racing late in life, despite having Ben Lexcen, one of the great names of international sailing and boat design, as his step-father.

Like many, if not most of the 700 skippers and crew members who sailed in this year’s race, sailing is one of life’s pleasures for the 51 year old, be it competition in a 2.5-metre sailing dinghy or racing around the harbour buoys every Saturday.