'I SPENT HOURS IN THE WATER IN HURRICANE CONDITIONS'

When John Quinn's boat was knocked down in the 1993 Sydney to Hobart yacht race, his harness broke and he found himself overboard at night in a hurricane-strength storm. Amazingly he lived to tell the tale, as Mark Chisnell discovered

- Mark Chisnell

When we saw the race briefing it was a little bit fuzzy,’ John Quinn told me, recalling events that had happened over three decades earlier, before the start of the Sydney Hobart Race in 1993. ‘It could have been tough, it couldn’t have been tough, they were a bit uncertain…’ The object of the uncertainty was a low-pressure system headed for the Bass Strait, which separates the island state of Tasmania from the Australian mainland. It’s a key section of the legendary race to Hobart. ‘As it turned out the thing was a lot worse than what we thought it was going to be…’ continued Quinn. The winds in the storm that hit the ’93 race fleet reached over 70 knots, equivalent to a low-grade hurricane.

John Quinn and the crew aboard his J/35 MEM hit the full force of the storm in the Bass Strait on Monday night, 27 December 1993. Just before midnight a wave came out of nowhere, picked up the boat and threw all but one of the on-deck crew overboard. All of them clawed their way back, except for one. ‘When my weight hit the harness, it busted... I ended up in the water,’ said Quinn.

The crew hit the man overboard button and recorded the yacht’s position which was transmitted with the Mayday call, and the search started. The water temperature was about 18°C. This was on Quinn’s side. It was the only thing he had going for him. ‘We’re talking about seas of on average 8m and they’re breaking,’ said Quinn. There was little chance of being spotted from a yacht.

It was around 0500 on Tuesday morning when the tanker Ampol Sarel arrived at the search zone. The captain, Bernie Holmes, took the decision to start at the original point where Quinn had gone overboard, then shut down the engines and let the huge ship drift downwind. He turned on all the lights so she would coast silently through the search area lit up like a Christmas tree. It was an inspired strategy.