The proving ground : the inside story of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart race / G. Bruce Knecht.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Knecht, G. Bruce.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sydney-Hobart Race--(54th : 1998).

Sydney-Hobart Race.

Yacht racing--Australia--History--20th century.

Yacht racing.

Storms--Tasman Sea--History--20th century.

Storms.

Search and rescue operations--Tasman Sea--History--20th century.

Search and rescue operations.

History.

Australia.

Physical Description:

295 pages : illustrations, map ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Boston : Little, Brown, and Co., [2001]

Summary:

Larry Ellison was lying in his bunk, calculating the likelihood that he would die. He was, thanks to his stock in his company, Oracle, one of the wealthiest men in the world. But right now, he was seasick and miserable, and the NASDAQ seemed very far away.

One day earlier, he had seen what was coming. Looking at one of the two laptop computers used on his boat, he saw a satellite-generated image of a cyclone-like cloud pattern. Gripped with the same surreal feeling of disconnectedness he sometimes had when he was flying a plane on instruments, he asked Mark Rudiger, the yacht's navigator, "Have you ever seen anything like this?" Almost imperceptibly, Rudiger shook his head.

"Well, I have," Ellison declared, his voice rising in bewildered outrage. "It was on the Weather Channel -- and it was called Hurricane Helen." Ellison's yacht Sayonara had been struggling ever since. Steep forty-foot waves were sucking Sayonara up terrifying crests and then releasing it into deep troughs. Going up felt like riding an elevator during an earthquake; going down felt as though the elevator's cable had snapped. Structural elements were beginning to fail. Several of the bulkheads, critical to maintaining the integrity of the hull, were no longer even attached. Ellison knew that at some point the hull would collapse like a paper bag against one of the waves. He also knew that Sayonara was too far out at sea to be reached by helicopter and that if he ended up in the water, he was unlikely to survive long enough to be rescued by another vessel...

Contents:

Part I The Calm 7

Part II East of Eden 75

Part III The Black Cloud 127

Part IV Adrift 195

Part V Wake 261.

ISBN:

0316499552

OCLC:

45749799