The crew member who won her Sydney-Hobart spot in an office lucky dip

At the beginning of November, Payal Pattanaik had never set foot on a boat. She hadn’t swum in deep ocean water, and she’d never heard of Hobart.

How quickly things can change. The 31-year-old software engineer will on Boxing Day join 19 other crew members aboard supermaxi LawConnect, skippered by legal tech entrepreneur Christian Beck.

Payal Pattanaik will sail with LawConnect in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race in 2022.

And while most of the more than 100 other boats racing approximately 630 nautical miles to Hobart knew more about sailing than Pattanaik, not all of them work for a boss who owns a super yacht. Employees of Beck’s companies were invited to apply to join Beck on his race south, but to Pattanaik’s surprise, only a handful of staff applied.

“It was a lucky draw,” Pattanaik told the Herald. “They pulled a name out of a hat and with a drum roll, they [announced] our names.”

“I thought it was just a random race,” said Pattanaik, who migrated to Australia less than two years ago. “I didn’t know where Hobart was ... until I Googled it, and it was in Tassie!”

Beck’s newest recruit and the more experienced crew have spent the last three weeks in full-time sailing preparation, going out on the 30-metre yacht most days. She’s slightly nervous – but mainly excited.

“People used to ask me, ‘Are you afraid?’,” she said. “If something should happen, I don’t have any fear. If I die, I want to do something different, something challenging myself.”

Pattanaik’s optimism is contagious, but for a man who spends about $1.5 million a year to enter the race, you’d expect Christian Beck to appear a little more confident of line honours.

“I think we have a chance of winning one day,” he said five days out from the annual race. But not this year. “The problem we’ve got is that Comanche is a better boat than us in every way,” he said.

That 100-foot maxi is wider and sturdier than LawConnect, and has a better track record in the Sydney to Hobart – it won line honours three times (2015, 2017 and 2019), compared to LawConnect’s zero.

But there’s still an inkling of hope that sees Beck come back to the race each year.

“There’s always things that go wrong with these boats ... especially when the conditions are harder, you can easily break a sail or break a rudder, that means Comanche could have a problem or we could win.”

“We probably don’t have a huge chance each year,” he said. “But if you average it out over a period of time, I think we eventually will win.”

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