Will Oxley

Now that was 400 kilometres away.

So it was a long way and not immediately expected to affect us, but it was significantly more than the Bureau had been forecasting.

And by that stage, we were just beginning to enter Bass Strait.

And then I remember at nine o'clock, or maybe it was 9.30, I repeated that again, just before we got out of the range of the land.

And Wilson's Promontory was now reporting 79 knots.

And I'd never seen that in my life at that point.

So if we call it 80, that's 160 kilometres an hour.

My gosh.

And now Wilson's Promontory is 89 metres in the air, the observation station.

So you expect that it's going to overread relative to what you see on the water.

But even if you reduce 10% from that, it's still a crazy number.

So by that stage, we were...

well into Bass Strait and the seas were a conservative eight metres and the wind was probably in around 40 knots, so 80 kilometres an hour, which was, and that's not an unusual wind strength.

The forecast suggested that there was this low that had developed, but it was moving, it was to the south of us and it was moving quite quickly and moving out into

the Tasman Sea.

So we, at that point, we were comfortable steering a particular course that was safe.

We experimented with even taking all of the sails down.

Well, it...

The boat is, because in a modern day boat, the keels are much smaller than a more traditional boat.

And so the thing becomes a bit, instead of being a cork, it sort of is more like a piece of polystyrene that is getting blown along the.