Will Oxley

I imagine there was an element of that sort of survivor's guilt that, well, just by the grace of God, we were still around and other people weren't.

But by the same token, we did the right things at the right time.

And as a result of that, we all survived.

And so that message of being well prepared, sailing with people that you trust and sailing in a well-found boat have obviously stuck by me.

The other thing that's happened since 1998 is that the quality of the weather forecasting has improved dramatically and our ability to access that weather information has improved dramatically.

Yes, I've done it 19 times.

And it's not going to paint me in a good light, but in 2003 we managed to win the race line honours and then in 2004 in the same boat the keel broke and we ended up in the life raft.

So I have had my fair share of incidents.

So we were living in Sydney at that point and it was before internet.

I'm not sure.

I must have looked up in a yachting magazine and found an advertisement for a guy named Barry Lewis who was teaching celestial navigation and that's what we call navigation.

navigating by the stars.

And so back in the 80s, early 80s, before there was GPS, as you say, you had to demonstrate that you could do celestial navigation in order to be able to even navigate a yacht in the City to Hobart race.

And so I decided at 16 or 17 that this would be a good skill for me to learn.

There's a lot of maths involved.

And Barry Lewis, though, was the son of Dr. David Lewis, who circumnavigated Antarctica in a steel boat called Icebird and wrote several books.

And he also spent a lot of time in the Pacific learning about the traditional art of navigation from the Polynesians.

So his son...

had picked up the traditional skills from his father, but he was also now teaching the more conventional skills.

So we start off in the classroom and deal with quite a bit of the theory.