Great vision

• NEWS
• 20 Dec, 2017 10:51:00 AM

Great vision

There are a lot of drop-dead gorgeous racing boats in this year’s Rolex Sydney Hobart, but on Boxing Day keep an eye out for a bright red timber boat from Adelaide called Enchantress.

She looks pretty basic, but skipper John Willoughby reckons she is a little ripper. Designed and built over three years in his garage by South Australian GP John Muirhead, Enchantress is a sonnet to craftsmanship and dedication to detail.

“John first made a one tenth model of what he wanted,” Willoughby says, ”and then he sliced it at various stations and measured it and made the frames on the floor of his garage. Every time the boat is measured for rating they always remark how absolutely true the boat is and absolutely identical from its centre line.”

Willoughby thinks that out of the water Enchantress looks like a big Flying Dutchman dinghy  and she loves broad reaching in a fresh breeze, “Though we don’t mind the odd flat calm because everybody pays twice the parking fines that we do (on our rating),” he laughs. She has compiled a marvellous race record over the years, including winning the 2010 Melbourne to Hobart under IRC, PHS AMS – a clean sweep.

He puts the boat’s successes down to a small, tough spinnaker that is as old as the boat (34). “In 2010 I suggested we change down to the smaller spinnaker when the wind got up to about 25 knots. We blasted down the Tasmanian cost at 22 knots, and when we dropped it in Storm Bay, the anemometer was showing 42 knots. We killed off everybody else because no-one could carry a spinnaker in these winds - and we did.”

Each year Willoughby and his crew spend a fortnight sailing Enchantress up to Sydney, fine tuning crew and boat on the way, dash down to Hobart, and then make their sunburnt way back to Adelaide. All up it takes about six weeks.

They will battle through at least two weather systems on the way to Hobart, are just as likely to drift up a desultory River Derwent in the dead of night and storm up in glory to a cheering crowd mid-afternoon, and will down a few at the Customs House. Win or lose, they will have a ball, which really is what the Sydney Hobart has been about for 70 years.  

Except this year will be John Willoughby’s last hurrah.

An ophthalmologist for 10 years, Willoughby did two weeks of voluntary surgery in Tonga each year for Ausaid. “We’d see 2000 people and do 200 operations in that time.” For the past seven years he has been spending three weeks of his holidays restoring sight to villagers in Tuvalu. 

When he was last there, the Health Minister asked him if maybe he could come back three times a year. At first, Willoughby said that he was working full time and was already giving up three of his four week annual holidays, so didn’t have time. But on the plane back he thought about the six weeks it takes him to do the Rolex Sydney Hobart….

Getting the masses of equipment he needs to operate in from Australia is a constant nightmare, and while the government sponsors remote islanders to come to the main island for the operation, a lot are too poor or old to make the trek. So Willoughby is thinking a big catamaran might be the go down the track.

“The surgical team could just fly in as normal, but they would have somewhere to sleep, and we could cart the bulky supplies around,” he muses.

Willoughby isn’t giving up his day job just yet. He performs about a thousand operations a year in South Australia, but it is pretty easy to see a whole next stage to his life emerging as he and nurses Joan and Penny Nemeth, steadily gets their charity, Vision of Islands, up and running over the next few years.

So have a cracker of a race, John Willoughby, and see you in Hobart.

The race starts on Boxing Day at 1300hrs AEDT and will be broadcast live on the Seven Network throughout Australia.

Full list of entries and all information: http://rolexsydneyhobart.com/

By Jim Gale, RSHYR media