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Peter Bourke celebrated his 74th birthday single-handedly sailing his 1960s 29ft kauri sloop Diablo through heavy seas across the Tasman.
He’d been battling 5-6 metre swells and snatching sleep by the minute as he competed in the Solo Trans Tasman Yacht Challenge, the world’s second oldest race of its kind.
But he still managed to hear his grandchildren sing “Happy Birthday” via his Starlink connection.
Now back at his Tawharanui home, the Sandspit Yacht Club member has reflected on undertaking the gruelling race at his age.
The Solo Trans Tasman Yacht Challenge started back in 1970, and taking part had long been a bucket-list dream for the lifelong sailor. He finished fifth on handicap out of the 11 vessels that completed the Opua to Gold Coast 1200 nautical mile marathon.
“I’m 74 and the boat’s 56 years old, so a combined age of 130 years.” Not a bad effort, he says, for what the smallest boat in the fleet.
Handicaps are based on boat size and predicted length of time to complete the 1170 nautical mile course. Bourke’s predicted time was 11d 13h 49m, but he completed the trip in 10d 19h 3m, ninth across the line but beating his time lifted him four places.
For context, Bourke’s 29ft kauri sloop, built by Keith Eade in Henderson, was up against much bigger multihull and monohull vessels, many with much more modern technology.
The official race website states: The Solo Trans-Tasman Yacht Challenge is one of the world’s most demanding offshore races – where sailors take on the wild Tasman Sea alone. No crew. No rest. Just skill, resilience, and relentless determination.
Bourke says the race has got some real history. “It’s an epic journey, because it goes across the Tasman, and the Tasman is a notorious stretch of water. It lived up to its reputation. We had three lows, and we went straight into them.
“The first night was gale conditions, and then we further on we had electrical storms, and then we had calms, and eventually we had a nice run into the Gold Coast. But it was it was pretty wild.”
Four of the 15 starters were forced to turn back, and an 11th boat just made it despite extensive hull damage.
Bourke puts his successful crossing down to preparation. “You have to have your boat well prepared to start with, so that it doesn’t fall apart. You’ve got to have it set up for single-handed sailing, so a lot of a lot of the controls come back to the cockpit where one person is dealing with adjusting the sails and so on.”
Even so, his autopilot failed on the first night, but preparation meant he had a back-up, although that failed on the trip home.
“You can’t cook food, so you’ve got to prepare it in advance. I had some of that sort of freeze-dried stuff, which wasn’t very nice.”
Sleep, too, has to be managed given it’s a solo race in an often hostile ocean.
“You just grab sleep when you can, you’re operating on a 24 hour day, not sort of daytime and nighttime. So in the day, if everything was set up and going nicely, I would jump into the bunk in 30-minute bits.”
So will he do the race again? The answer was to the point: “No.”
