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Lone sailor delighted to be back with the pack

Lone sailor delighted to be back with the pack
Hugo Boss will contest the 2005 Rolex Sydney Hobart

Lone sailor delighted to be back with the pack

Melbourne sailor Nick Moloney may have climbed every Everest in international yachting - the Vendee single handed round-the-world race, the America’s Cup, the Whitbread Round the World (now the Volvo Ocean Race), the Rolex Fastnet to name a few – but as a born and bred Aussie, the Rolex Sydney Hobart has a special place in his heart.

Melbourne sailor Nick Moloney may have climbed every Everest in international yachting - the Vendee single handed round-the-world race, the America’s Cup, the Whitbread Round the World (now the Volvo Ocean Race), the Rolex Fastnet to name a few – but as a born and bred Aussie, the Rolex Sydney Hobart has a special place in his heart. 

 “The Rolex Sydney Hobart is the toughest short offshore race,” he says.

“Three days at sea isn’t a big span of time for me in an offshore race but it’s so difficult in the way you go through three distinct weather systems, off the mainland coast into the cold waters of Bass Strait and then the geographic influence of Tasmania, and it sets you up for three really serious transitions. 

 “I’m yet to do a race where I haven’t had a serious kicking. 

“My kindest race was in 1996 (he was on Ausmaid when she won on handicap).

“It is personally one of my greatest victories because I’ve grown up with the race being the top event.” 

This time last year Moloney was 300 miles south of Tasmania, a lonely competitor on the loneliest race in the world, the Vendee. He concedes that he is not, by nature, a natural single-handed sailor.  Gregarious, talkative, he finds the solitude of long distance solo races very hard – “I do it because I’m hopeless at it” – so it is perhaps ironic that Moloney’s return to crewed racing is on board Englishman Alex Thomson’s Hugo Boss, an Open 60 purpose built to be sailed by one in the Vendee. 

Somehow a crew of 10 is being shoehorned into the yacht for the trip to Hobart.  And like Moloney, the extroverted Thomson is an odd candidate for solo racing. 

“Alex and I have been pretty heavily united in the solo scene because we feel like we’re probably the closest to normal out of the fleet because we find the discipline pretty bizarre,” said Moloney. 

“So we confide in each other about our reservations, our fears and our loneliness.” 

Having lost part of his own canting keel during a race, Moloney is surprisingly frank about the questions surrounding the new technology that is the latest word in round-the-world and maxi yachts.   

“The best thing about when your keel falls off is the boat’s probably not going to sink, because you’ve lost the thing that’s trying to drag you to the bottom of the ocean,” he says.   

“My personal beef is that we’re only human and we shouldn’t be able to break the boats.  The boats should break us every time.   

“Designers should be designing and constructing these boats for inclement weather and for serious sailors to be pushing these boats as hard as they can in inclement weather. 

“Nowadays sailors are going further and faster and we are pushing harder and the boats had better come with us.”