TOM CHENEY ON THE ROLEX SYDNEY HOBART RACE
The Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race stands as a pinnacle of offshore yacht racing. Its reputation as the hardest of the classic offshore races is well deserved. Compared to the northern hemisphere 600-milers, for example the Fastnet and Middle Sea Races, the 628-mile Sydney-Hobart is much more remote. Once out of Sydney Harbour, you quickly lose mobile phone signal and are left feeling isolated from the rest of the world, something which feels quite alien to most of us in 2023.
The New South Wales coast offers relatively few safe havens should you need to retire from the race, though this is nothing compared to the sense of exposure sailing in the Bass Strait. A fetch of thousands of miles of Southern Ocean and chilling sea temperatures create some of the most challenging conditions that many of us will ever experience. It's easy to see why this race has significantly stricter safety regulations than its northern hemisphere equivalents.
EXITING THE HEADS
The race begins with a true spectacle in Sydney Harbour, where hundreds of Australians gather to watch the start in a now well-established Boxing Day tradition. Television news helicopters, a packed spectator fleet and some key exclusion zones add to the excitement as you make your way out of the iconic Sydney Heads. Unlike many other big races the whole fleet starts at the same time, but spread across three staggered start lines. In order to make the race the same 628- mile length for everyone, the first two turning marks differ depending on your starting group (an extra complexity for the navigator!).
Typically the fleet starts in a north-easterly breeze, which means a fairly square beat to the first mark. The separate starting areas do help to ease the traffic a little for the smaller boats, but keeping a clean lane is paramount as you bounce off the marked spectator boundaries. After mark one, reaching for just over a mile out through the Heads can be a tussle, with plenty of boats still in close proximity. Sea state builds as you leave the harbour and there's not long to prepare for what is usually (initially) a VMG downwind leg down the New South Wales coast.
NEW SOUTH WALES COAST
After the excitement of leaving Sydney Harbour, navigators now encounter their first major decision point: choosing the route south through the East Australian Current (EAC) and
