Peter Wilkinson will be sailing on Wild Rose in this years Sydney to Hobart Yacht race. Picture: Tim Hunter Source: The Daily Telegraph
HE was a teenager who used to pretend he was racing in a Sydney to Hobart while rowing his tiny dingy in a circle on the small dam on his family farm.
A dreamer who used to stare out the school bus window each afternoon at the ocean wishing he was a sailor.
A schoolboy from Eden on the far NSW south coast who wrote an essay which won him what he though was going to be the ride of his life.
It was. But it wasn't the ride budding sailor Pete Wilkinson had expected.
Instead of just racing to Hobart, Wilkinson raced into the eye of a deadly storm. Smack bang into it.
When a Bass Strait bomb exploded in the form of a deep depression in 1998 it became one of the most deadly storms in ocean racing history.
The 17-year-old, under the guardianship of veteran skipper Roger Hickman on Atara, survived, Six men who started the 1998 Sydney to Hobart did not.
"It was my first ocean race. I though that was what it was supposed to be like," said Wilkinson, now 31, who is returning for another Hobart with Hickman this year on the 43-footer Wild Rose, a contender for the overall handicap honours in the 20120 Rolex Sydney to Hobart.
"I remember it was beautiful the fist day and then we had this really exciting first night of running. Then it all goes a bit blurry."
Sent below deck for safety, Wilkinson said he inhabit ted a world where he was both wet,violently il and tossed around like a rag doll. A world he would like to forget.
"It was horrible below. Really horrible," he remembers
But he vividly remembers being called up on deck just prior to the storm unleashing its full fury in Bass Strait the second day at sea.
"I'll never forget what Hicko (Hickman) did for me. One memory I have is him clipping me on and bringing me up on deck.' Wilkinson said.
"There were swirling mountains (of waves) and white forth all around me.
"He said, 'you may never see this again'. "
Hickman also remembers the moment. It was just prior to one of the most frightening moments he has ever experienced at sea.
"The waves were huge, long and you could see they were 65 foot from trough to top," he said.
"I was in awe of it. They weren't menacing just then. They were just huge.
"Out most catastrophic moment was after, when we were sailing bare poles (with no sail up) in 60 knots.
"We got on a wave. The breeze dropped momentarily and we lost momentum and we surfed 200m sideways."
Unlike the six men who perished at sea in that race, the seven yachts that sank and the 55 sailors rescued by Navy and civil search and rescue, Wilkinson and Hickman survived relatively unscathed.
And incredibly, it didn't put Wilkinson off returning to the race, although he admits his first one is never far from his mind.
"That was a Sydney to Hobart as far as I was concerned," he said. "I didn't really realise how bad it was until I was sailing across Bass Strait in 14 knots a couple of years ago and realised how crazy that first one was."
After years travelling the world and working as a professional TV cameraman, Wilkinson admits he has become hooked on the Hobart again.
He did the race in 2010 and this years trek south on Wild Rose will be his third - but not last.
"There was something about that race in 1998 that made me think I was cut out for ocean racing," he said.
"It didn't really put me off.
"But the more I sail the more I realise how crazy it was.
"If you though it was going to be like that every year there is no way you would do it again."
This year around 100 crew will sail to Hobart on 77 yachts, ranging from cutting edge 100-footers to wooden 30-footers.
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