Travis Foley was 12 when he raced in 1998’s deadly Sydney to Hobart
Travis Foley was the youngest sailor in the 1998 race and aboard David Pescud’s Sailors with disABILITIES boat, Aspect Computing. He and Pescud recall the drama.
- Sounds of panic and hysteria haunt skipper
- Skipper remembers: ‘I can still see the boat sinking’
- Sydney to Hobart: Recalling the killer storm of 1998
“We saw humanity in its absolute pristine state. There was just love and release. This woman’s son had been returned to her.” Skipper David Pescud on Travis Foley, 12, being reunited with his mum on Constitution Dock at the end of the 1998 race.
For 12-year-old Travis Foley, racing in the Sydney to Hobart was going to be the biggest adventure of his life. But for most of a hell-ride south, he was sent down below deck, shielded from the deadliest race in history.
About all he remembers of the 1998 race is sticking his head through the hatch and seeing giant waves and startling white caps above him where there should have been sky.
Foley claims he has little scarring from the tragedy - he was kept out of harm’s way by the actions of a heroic veteran skipper.
Sydney’s David Pescud steered his mixed crew, which included leg and arm amputees and hearing- and vision-impaired sailors, through the storm virtually unscathed.
Foley remains one of the youngest to have competed in a Sydney to Hobart, with a minimum age requirement of 18 introduced in the wake of 1998 as part of a slew of changes designed to improve safety.
“I remember sticking my head out and seeing the white caps, but through the worse of it we were kept below and down there I remember getting thrown about a lot,” said Foley, now a father of two and a business owner in Queensland.
“Maybe I am lucky I was so young. But it has helped make me who I am now.
“I never did another race, I grew up, worked hard, got married and had kids.
“But I’d like to do it again one day.”
Skipper Pescud, a wily old seaman, had great faith in his boat and his crew.
Pescud had sailed through a 70-knot storm just a few years earlier in the 1993 race, which had a higher attrition rate for boat retirements than 1998, with 104 of 150 boats pulling out. But unlike 1998, when six people were lost at sea, there were no fatalities.
“By 10am (December 27) it was on,” Pescud says. “We could see the big waves coming, actually hear them before we could see them.
“We were 30 to 50 miles into Bass Strait. What do you do? Do you turn and go back? But that was taking a beam sea (rolling in at right angles against a ship’s side). I wasn’t keen on that. I like to have my bow into a seaway (the front of the boat heading into the rough seas).
“So I thought, we had no reason to change course. We just kept heading to Tasmania.
“I would have turned around if I was on NSW Coast. I would have turned my tail so fast it would have spun your head around. This is a yacht race, it is not your life.”
Pescud eventually steered Aspect Computing out of the storm and across the finish line – one of only 44 yachts to finish the race.
But before they made it safety to dock, they had an unexpected encounter with eventual overall winner Midnight Rambler, a little 35-footer and the smallest boat in a decade to win.
“We thought we were on our own out there,” Pescud says. “The waves were bloody big.
“Then we went over this enormous wave and at the top we saw Midnight Rambler almost right there, two guys on the rail.
“There she was chugging along, we thought we were seeing things.’’
Pescud says he and his crew were in their own little world during the race, every ounce of their being focused on surviving.
It wasn’t until they were moored at Constitution Dock in Hobart that the enormity of what they had been through began to sink in.
“It was about survival, we were just focused on surviving,” Pescud says. “You cannot afford to let anything else into your mind.
“If something breaks, you fix it. If something else breaks, you fix it. I dealt with it one wave at a time. We just bought it down to a really narrow world.
“I wasn’t aware of the stress Travis’s mum was under, the stress my family was under. I was concerned with now. We pulled the wool over and did what we had to do.
“We arrived. We knew colleagues had died, friends were gone.
“We knew we had won our division, we knew the boat was smashed up. It was weird dealing with them all at once. It was a bit of a blur.
“But one of the clear images I remember was backing the boat in at Constitution Dock.
“Travis was in the cockpit and he looked up and saw his mum. He just levitated off the back somehow and landed in her embrace.
“She just opened her arms wide and took him in, pulled him inside her.
“I will never forget that. That was the first time the outside world impacted me. Prior to that, it was about surviving our little world.
“We saw humanity in its absolute pristine state. There was just love and release. This women’s son had been returned to her.’’
Then someone, another skipper, David Witt off Nokia, came to the boat.
“He came up to shake my hand. He came up and said, ‘Well done, you have walked on water’,’’ Pescud says. “ I have always remembered that.’’
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