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It's humble but it's home

It's humble but it's home
The RYCT finishing box on Castray Esplanade

It's humble but it's home

It’s a humble structure, just 15 square metres in area; it has no hot water, just an aged cold water tap that has lost its chrome; it has a portable outside toilet, an old fridge, a pie warmer and a fax, which is its token recognition to new technology.

It’s a humble structure, just 15 square metres in area; it has no hot water, just an aged cold water tap that has lost its chrome; it has a portable outside toilet, an old fridge, a pie warmer and a fax, which is its token recognition to new technology.

But it’s home to the two most important objects at the Hobart end of the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race – a flagpole and a small digital clock.

It’s the finishing box on Castray Esplanade. It is not the original finishing box for the Rolex Sydney Hobart. That was about 100 metres further into Sullivans Cove – closer to Hobart, further from Sydney. The box was moved when the CSIRO was built. But that raises all sorts of other issues that we won’t go into.

Cream in colour, the box stands alone on the bank of the Derwent next to the CSIRO Division of Fisheries and Oceanography, its role signified by the flagpole and its attached rigging for racing pennants. The sliding windows face out to the river to give the best view of the finish line.

A line between the flagpole and a mark about 100 metres out into the river is the official end of the 628 nautical mile race. When the bow of a racing yacht crosses the line, there are two people paying close attention in the box – an observer, who sounds the siren when the moment arrives, and the recorder who notes the time on the clock.

They work six-hour shifts, even when no boats are due.
“The rule is that the box will always be manned from the time the first yacht finishes to January 2nd,” says Rae Batt, the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania official charged with the responsibility of running the box.

It seems not all yachts can be relied on to report their position accurately, even when passing the Iron Pot and entering the Derwent.

When Mitch Booth’s Volvo 60 DHL crossed the line in eighth position in this year’s race, Tim Swann and Dudley Chung were in charge of the box. They are volunteers who normally work with the engineering firm Gutteridge Haskins and Davey in Hobart.

As the Volvo 60 approached the line, Chung stood to eye the line; Swann sat and stared at the clock; the crew looked over to the box, men frozen in time; Chung continued to stare down the line; then he pressed the klaxon; the men in red danced on the deck, yahooed and cheered, fired into a frenzy by Chung; the spinnaker collapsed; the men in red gathered it in; her race was run.

Swann and Chung would finish only two other yachts that night. In the meantime, and in the absence of a TV, they shot their own breeze, locked in their small, private world. - Bruce Montgomery