When we saw the race briefing it was a little bit fuzzy,’ John Quinn told me, recalling events that had happened over three decades earlier, before the start of the Sydney Hobart Race in 1993. ‘It could have been tough, it couldn’t have been tough, they were a bit uncertain…’

The object of the uncertainty was a low-pressure system headed for the Bass Strait, which separates the island state of Tasmania from the Australian mainland. It’s a key section of the legendary race to Hobart. ‘As it turned out the thing was a lot worse than what we thought it was going to be…’ continued Quinn. The winds in the storm that hit the ’93 race fleet reached over 70 knots, equivalent to a low-grade hurricane.

John Quinn and the crew aboard his J/35 MEM hit the full force of the storm in the Bass Strait on Monday night, 27 December 1993. Just before midnight a wave came out of nowhere, picked up the boat and threw all but one of the on-deck crew overboard. All of them clawed their way back, except for one. ‘When my weight hit the harness, it busted… I ended up in the water,’ said Quinn.

The crew hit the man overboard button and recorded the yacht’s position which was transmitted with the Mayday call, and the search started. The water temperature was about 18°C. This was on Quinn’s side. It was the only thing he had going for him. ‘We’re talking about seas of on average 8m and they’re breaking,’ said Quinn. There was little chance of being spotted from a yacht.

It was around 0500 on Tuesday morning when the tanker Ampol Sarel arrived at the search zone. The captain, Bernie Holmes, took the decision to start at the original point where Quinn had gone overboard, then shut down the engines and let the huge ship drift downwind. He turned on all the lights so she would coast silently through the search area lit up like a Christmas tree.

It was an inspired strategy.

Drifting in the dark

It was another Australian, Brent Shaw, an able seaman aboard the tanker, that heard John Quinn’s cries and picked him out with his searchlight. ‘And there he was, waving and screaming,’ he told reporters from the Sydney Morning Herald afterwards.

Quinn was about 20m away from the 100,000-tonne tanker. ‘The scary part was we spotted him and then he drifted out of the searchlight, and then he was in the dark again,’ added Shaw.

The Ampol Sarel radioed to the other searching boats that they had seen Quinn, and one of those that heard the message was a 40-footer called Atara. They had already had their own share of adventure that night. A wave had rumbled in and hit the sails of Atara with such force that it had snapped the rig. They cut it away, but not before it smashed a hole in the hull.

Atara was in serious trouble. They started pulling the bunks off the side of the boat and using them to try to shore up the structure because it was caving in under the wave motion. It was at this moment that they heard about John Quinn and diverted towards the search area – even as they struggled to keep their own boat afloat.

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One of the crew was a 21-year-old called Tom Braidwood, who would go on to a professional career with America’s Cup and Volvo Ocean Race teams. ‘We got to the area and we’re all just on deck with torches down each side of the boat. And we’re just motoring around and next thing you know, we saw him and it was like… talk about the luckiest guy on earth, well, unlucky falling in, but…’

They struggled to get him out of the water, lost him once and had to do a couple of passes to get back to him. ‘He was drifting on and off the boat and it’s hard to keep him there,’ said Braidwood. ‘I had a harness on, so I turned around to the guys and said, “I’m going to go get him.” I had my harness tied to a rope as well, I dove in, and swam out to him. And as soon as I got him, it was like, “Uuuuhhhh,” you know, like complete collapse.’

Somehow Braidwood got him back to the boat, and after an immense struggle they got him onboard. ‘We dragged him down below and he was hypothermic because all he had on was thermals and a dinghy vest, like a  little lifejacket.’

Lifejacket decisions

I first heard this story in Sydney, not long after that Hobart, which I had raced aboard a 50ft yacht called Ragamuffin.

It took me nearly 30 years to get around to tracking down John Quinn and asking him what he was doing in the water in hurricane conditions with no lifejacket.

John Quinn was no naive newbie to sailing, the Hobart or the risks. He was brought up in Sydney and had spent his childhood in and around the water, racing his first Hobart at 21, and owning several yachts prior to MEM.

‘I had on a Musto flotation vest,’ Quinn told me. ‘They produced these vests which were actually more for warmth, but they actually gave you a little bit of flotation… I also had on a normal [foul weather] jacket, but the jacket was weighing me down so I got rid of it. And I had sea boots on which I got rid of.’ But what about the lifejacket? ‘We had normal lifejackets… You remember how bulky those things were, you can’t get around the boat wearing them. They’re terrible things.’

The lifejackets that were onboard MEM were of the type that typically relies on closed-cell polyethylene foam for buoyancy. They were big and could be awkward to wear and made it difficult to move around the boat. So Quinn had decided not to wear it. ‘We were relying on our safety harnesses really. You don’t expect to end up in the water if you’re using a safety harness, not when you’re clipped on.’ John Quinn had chosen the harness as his personal safety gear, and the harness had failed him.

Survival techniques

He tried a couple of survival techniques he had picked up, including sealing the foul weather jacket and filling it with air to provide buoyancy. ‘There’s no way that that will actually work in real life.’ He also tried pulling into a foetal position to protect himself as the waves hit him.

‘That was one of the worst ideas they ever came up with because you get one of these waves that picks you up and it chucks you around […] You get a roller coming up and it just picks you up and it just throws you. I mean, it’ll throw a four-tonne yacht… I tried that first, decided that was a really bad idea. No, you don’t want to go there.’

The problem was the breaking waves, the dangerous part being the white water. ‘What I ended up doing was to do what we always used to do when the waves came at us when we were surfing – just dive under it. The flotation vest wasn’t so buoyant that it stopped me doing that so I was able to get through them.’

This technique would have been impossible in one of the lifejackets that Quinn had left aboard MEM because its buoyancy would have kept him on the surface.

‘I would’ve hated to have been out there with one of those things on,’ he pointed out. The much-less buoyant flotation vest that Quinn was wearing enabled him to handle the breaking waves – so long as he was strong enough to keep himself afloat with its limited support… and that was a close-run thing.

It was 0509 when Quinn was pulled out of the water, five hours and 27 minutes after he went overboard. ‘How could anyone do that?’ said Braidwood, reflecting on Quinn’s feat of endurance. Exhausted and hypothermic, the crew of Atara got him into a bunk with one of the only crew who was still dry.

‘We had the space blankets around him and kept jamming cups of tea into him,’ said Braidwood as they resumed the passage home. A passage that they eventually completed safely, despite the boat’s parlous state.

Looking back

The mistakes John later identified, such as the suitability of his boat, the lifejackets, and his decision to continue despite the forecast all had a theme.

We could call it overconfidence; a deep belief that things are going to be all right, that nothing really bad is going to happen. It allows us to do things that in hindsight, particularly after our luck has run out, seem reckless. This instinctive overconfidence is a cognitive bias. These biases (and there are many of them) are hard-wired predispositions to types of behaviour.

The head of the TED organisation, Chris Anderson, interviewed Daniel Kahneman (the Nobel Prize winner who, along with Amos Tversky, was responsible for the original work on cognitive bias), and asked if Kahneman could ‘inject one idea into the minds of millions of people, what would that idea be?’ Kahneman replied, ‘Overconfidence is really the enemy of good thinking, and I wish that humility about our beliefs could spread.’

Mitigating risk

It’s surprising how often we can mitigate risks with little more than a moment’s thought. It can be as simple as putting a strobe light in the pocket of your foul weather gear. Or as simple as throwing a shovel and a couple of blankets in the back of the car at the start of the winter.

There are also a few strategies that we can employ to help us overcome the pernicious bias of overconfidence, ways to learn to slow down and pay better attention. One of them is to build habits to review risk whenever there’s time to do so. Neal McDonald, who sailed with six Volvo Ocean Race teams, developed the habit of playing a ‘what if’ game during any pause in the action.

At any moment he could start a pop quiz: ‘What do we do if that sail breaks?’ or ‘What’s the repair if the steering gear fails?’ McDonald was constantly looking for solutions to problems he did not yet have, and it’s a very powerful tool in raising everyone’s awareness of risk.

A more formal mechanism that does much the same job is the premortem, an idea that came from research psychologist Gary Klein.

The principle is straightforward; before any major decision goes forward, all the people involved in it gather for a premortem in which they project forward a year after the decision was enacted. The basis for the meeting is that the decision was a disaster, and everyone must explain why.

Klein thinks that it works because it frees people to speak up about the weaknesses of a project or plan.

McDonald’s ‘what if’ game and the premortem are just a couple of ways that reveal what might otherwise be hidden risks – like the bulky lifejackets. No bad thing when you consider the consequences of hauling up an anchor or untying the mooring lines.

For all its wonder and immense beauty, the sea is fundamentally hostile to human life; without the support of a ship or boat our survival has a very limited time horizon. Just ask John Quinn.

Lessons learned

Lifejackets: ‘The first thing I did when I came back was to throw out all the lifejackets,’ explained John Quinn. ‘And I put inflatable lifejackets on board the boat for everybody, because inflatable lifejackets allow you to control your buoyancy in the same way as a diver can control their buoyancy. And that I regard as absolutely critical because I think with a full lifejacket [and] those waves picking you up, I don’t think you’d last very long.’

Boat suitability: ‘I shouldn’t have been racing a boat that light in the Sydney to Hobart race. The J/35 is a magnificent little coastal racing boat, but it’s not designed to go into that sort of weather.’

Safety decisions: ‘When I realised we were going into that sort of weather, I should have pulled the plug and simply peacefully sailed into Twofold Bay. I shouldn’t have allowed myself to get out of control, I know better than that. They were the two fundamental mistakes.’

Man overboard: John was initially found by the two vessels that were looking for him using sound first, before they could see him. Turn your engine off, drop sails and stay quiet when searching for a MOB.

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