Let’s Read: “A Hard Chance: The Sydney-Hobart Race Disaster”, Ch. 1-3
Chapter 1
Reading a lot of books about adventure sports donated to used bookstores twenty and twenty-five years after publication, it’s easy, even as someone alive at the time who definitely remembers playing in the snow, to form a mental image of the late 1990s as a long, sun-drenched, and slightly grainy summer full of outrageously pink and purple rock climbing gear and people in baggy white t-shirts beneath colorful spinnakers. It fits well with the motion of the metaphorical pre-9/11 “holiday from history” and has obvious parallels with the poetic view of the early 1910s as the pre-WWI “summer before the dark”, so in this essay I will—
Nah, never mind, too pretentious and off-topic, I’ll stop right there.
But Chapter 1 of “A Hard Chance” does appropriately put us in the midst of a festive sunny day on Sydney Harbour in the height of (Australian) summer with 115 sailboats at the start line, countless spectator craft, and colorful kites flown onshore.
I spelled it “Sydney Harbour” because I interpret that as a place name and I was taught that place names are proper names and thus keep local spelling, but a general reference like “the harbor was filled with spectator boats” would use American spelling. Leighton doesn’t do this and says “Sydney Harbor”.
Also in the first paragraph, we are told that Boxing Day is celebrated across the Commonwealth of Nations, “from which Australia has been independent since 1901″. This is incorrect, while Australia’s previously-individual colonies did unite into one nation in 1901, officially making it a nation, Australia is part of the Commonwealth and was in 1998. Well, I don’t feel very confident about seeing information I know is wrong in the first paragraph, but let’s move on…
We are told we are days away from the New Year’s celebration “that will usher in the last year of the century and the countdown to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney”. 2000 was definitely the year as a kid that I first became aware of Sydney and of Australia as a whole, first because it was one of the first major cities to enter the Millennium, so we saw the fireworks on the news when it was still daytime on the US East Coast, and then watching the Olympics several months later. (I wrote this piece about my childhood fascination with Australia that those events spawned on my main blog.)
(I am NOT getting into whether the 21st century started in 2000 or 2001, that’s a whole can of worms…)
Apparently Australians call helicopters “flying dirt bikes”. @that-girl-who-sails, can you confirm?
Holy crud, Liz Wardley of Volvo Ocean Race fame was a skipper in the 1998 Sydney-Hobart, when she was only 19!?!? I didn’t know that. Leighton says “she’ll be a force to reckon with in future races”, and he was right.
We get a snapshot of the fun names of the smaller boats competing, which is something I always love. I think ‘Sword of Orion’ is definitely the most poetic. Aaron Sorkin must have agreed, because he liked it enough to lift the name from the news reports of the disaster and reuse it for a fictional yacht in an episode of Sports Night a few months later.
We have a nice hand-drawn map of the race route at the end of Chapter 1.
Chapter 2
We are told that the end of 1998 was full of chaotic weather across Australia, with Cyclones Billy and Thelma making landfall, and Tasmania experiencing a record heatwave. The low front that caused the fatal storm also caused gales with 90-mile-per-hour gusts in Tasmania, snow in the mountains near Melbourne, and huge dust storms and forest fires in the interior. (Not as severe as those of the 2019-20 season, but still chilling for those who remember the 2019 Sydney-Hobart leaving amidst the smoke.)
i’d say “You know this is before 2005 because the the point of reference for a Category 5 hurricane/cyclone is Hurricane Camille in 1969 and not Hurricane Katrina”, but even in 1999 Hugo and Andrew would have presumably been more recent references to make in the US.
Ah, 1999, when you could discuss the East Australian Current without the now-obligatory Finding Nemo jokes. We are told that sailing when the wind and current are moving in the same direction is fun and sailing when they are moving in opposite directions is awful.
Like the Drake Passage, the Bass Straight is so rough because it’s a small opening through which waves that have previously rolled unimpeded across oceans are suddenly forced.
Once again, Leighton reflects that in Australia, sailing is a more commonplace sport with a less elitist reputation than in the United States.
“Flying death machines” yes but no, I’ve not heard helicopters being called flying dirt bikes (it could be an East coast thing though)
Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/645198049578303488.
