Fireworks Greet Final Boat to Finish Sydney to Hobart, The Crew May Surprise You

Just 18 minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve, Currawong would reach the finish line of the 77th Great Race in Hobart welcomed by a huge crowd of New Year's revelers and, of course, fireworks.

While the world was focused on the drag race that ensued in the super-maxi and mini-maxi classes as they left Sydney Harbor on Boxing Day, Kathy Veel and Bridget Canham began the race aboard their Currawong 30 (9.1 meters) boat in what would shape up to be a marathon. The modern big boats of the super-maxi would complete the 628-nautical mile race (1,163 km) in under two days, with Andoo Comanche taking Line Honours.

After five days at sea, the two-handed crew of Currawong would finally complete a journey that was filled with tireless work and an unexpected stopover in Eden to get some rest and wait out a weather pattern. The remarkable aspect of the crew is not just that they are women, but they are up there in age when compared to almost every other entrant in the race and racing one of the smallest and oldest boats.

Owner and co-skipper Kathy Veel is a 70-year-old retired teacher, co-skipper Bridget Canham is a 62-year-old retired nurse, and Currawong is a 48-year-old sloop. These women obviously do not follow the norm with regard to their retirement days, where many people take up oil painting or knitting. Instead, they decided to compete in a yacht race considered to be one of the most difficult offshore passages.

They would finish as the 100th and final boat to reach the finish line of the 109 boats that began the race. They were nine retirees during the event, and the crew of the Currawong may have been a race casualty as well, had cooler heads not prevailed earlier in the race.

Veel decided to lay up in Eden New South Wales for a little rest and more importantly, wait out a weather pattern that was forecast to hit the waters of the Bass Strait before carrying on. It proved to be a wise decision, but the women had to bust their tails to reach Hobart before the New Year bell rang at midnight.

"I found my limit. There was a pretty severe weather forecast for that night. There was one weather model predicting gusts in the high 40s/50s downwind."

"Heavy downwind sailing is scariest. I felt I wasn't the full quid and Bridget was the one who would be doing the sail changes." Veel was quoted as saying on Sail-World, 'We can put the trysail on, set the storm jib and we'll be right."

"I thought, Bridget is the one up there and she needs me to be 100 per cent to keep her there. I had this knot of anxiety in my stomach - and you can't go into a possibly extreme situation like that."

However, there was never any thought of retiring for the veteran sailors, and after some rest in Eden they forged on and made their New Year goal. In preparation for the race, Veel two-handedly sailed Currawong from Melbourne to Sydney and participated in the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia (CYCA) Bird Island Race in November.

The two intrepid yacht racers met while crewing on an all-women's crew that participated in the 1993 race that many believe was the toughest ever.