Will Oxley

Hi, Sarah.

Yeah, so I was part of a crew from Townsville and we were on a boat called B52.

And I'd done the race before a number of times with most of the guys on this boat.

The forecast was for strong, relatively strong northeasterlies.

And what that means is that the wind direction comes from the northeast.

And so when you get out the heads, you can put up a spinnaker, the big coloured sails, and rip south.

But we were expecting a fairly robust front to come through.

And so those of you that live on the east coast are well aware of the subtly change and the temperature drops dramatically.

And suddenly the wind is coming from the south.

And we were certainly expecting that we were going to see quite a lot of wind, maybe 40 knots.

But we were far from aware of what was to come when we set off.

So the forecast changed.

continued to deteriorate bit by bit.

There was some discrepancies between the different bureaus.

The Victorian Weather Bureau was saying something slightly different to the Sydney Weather Bureau.

But I remember at 6.30 in the morning, this was before, still really before certainly we had access to the internet and onboard.

And we used a sort of complicated technology

piece of equipment to essentially get a facsimile.

And this facsimile comes out and it says that Wilson's pyrometry was blowing at 71 knots.

So that's about 140 kilometres an hour.