The deadly voyage: Ten killed, two yachts vanished, only one finisher in tragic race
Sunday, 25 January 2026
**It was meant to be a celebration - a yacht race from Wellington to Lyttelton - but it quickly turned to catastrophe. On the 75th anniversary of **the world’s second-worst sailing disaster, Mike White investigates what went wrong, and why the tragedy has been largely forgotten.
At 8.48am on Tuesday January 23 1951, a short message was broadcast on Wellington radio station ZLW.
Sent from Tinakori Hill overlooking the capital, it was a coastal shipping forecast “in plain language”, according to the station’s documents.
It was as succinct as it was crucial.
But nobody was listening.
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In the harbour below, at the Royal Port Nicholson Yacht Club, 20 yachts were making final preparations for a race to Lyttelton marking Canterbury’s centenary, organised by the Banks Peninsula Cruising Club.
They had been lured by the occasion, by the adventure, by the £100 winner’s prize. Each boat had paid £1 to enter, with only a few conditions, including seaworthiness, and that their engines must remain sealed and unused during the race. Dinghies were optional.
Earlier that morning, at 7.15am, a few skippers had tuned in to a more popular Wellington radio station, 2YA, to listen to its weather forecast.
It mentioned a trough of low pressure in Cook Strait that evening, along with strong southeast winds and rain.
Most who heard it shrugged their shoulders and carried on with their breakfast. A glance outside showed only an overcast sky, with light easterlies.
The race favourites were predicted to complete the 174-nautical-mile (322km) journey in just over a day and skippers expected to be well down the South Island’s east coast before the winds rose.
But the 2YA forecast was a general land forecast, primarily for summer holidaymakers, campers and cricket officials.
And the coastal forecast that followed 90 minutes later on ZLW, sketched a different picture.
It issued a storm warning, predicting winds reaching gale force in Cook Strait.
But everyone was too busy to listen, preoccupied with last-minute repairs and stowing supplies.
When the starter’s gun fired at 10am off Clyde Quay, the yachts bobbed and tacked and heeled into the easterly.
Then they swung south, through the harbour’s entrance, and into a world none of them had foreseen or ever wanted to experience.
The eye of the storm
Catastrophe struck almost immediately,
The yacht Nanette collided with 30’ cutter Argo, smashing Argo’s bobstay - the chain between the bowsprit and hull that helps counteract the upward pull from the mast and sails.
Soon after, Restless, a sleek 40’ sloop, lost its mast and retired from the race.
As the yachts spread and entered Cook Strait, George Brasell on Joy looked ahead at the sky and swells, and began worrying.
A Lyttelton fisherman, Brasell was probably the most experienced seaman in the fleet. What he saw and sensed unsettled him.
After just 40km, Brassel decided to withdraw from the race.
“I felt there was something coming,” Brasell later said, “and decided to get out before it arrived.
“We were under-manned. I knew if we went on, we were going to get a hell of a hiding.”
The rest of the fleet continued, as the winds turned southerly and strengthened into a storm.
By the following afternoon, most yachts were near Kaikōura.
“Nearly all were in difficulties,” a report into the race noted.
Some turned back for Wellington, others sought shelter wherever they could find it.
But nobody managed to escape.
As George Brasell flew home to Christchurch two days after the race started, he stared at Cook Strait churning below him, before his view was swallowed by clouds, and gave thanks he wasn’t out there.
An incredible rescue
The next day, on the morning of Friday January 26, crew on an Air Force training flight from Wigram noticed a yacht in difficulty north of Kaikōura, and alerted Search and Rescue.
The yacht was Astral, skippered by Brian Miller of Hātaitai, in Wellington.
Miller later told how a gigantic wave rolled the yacht and snapped its mast just over a metre from the deck.
They tried to rig a sail to the stump and run back to Cape Campbell but it was hopeless.
The aircraft that spotted them dropped oil to smooth the water, but it barely helped.
“The sea had us beaten from the outset,” Miller said.
Back in Lyttelton, George Brasell readied his trawler, Tawera, and put to sea to search for Astral.
Miraculously, his crew located her, 30km off the Clarence River.
'We were like the dog that chased the train,' said Brasell. 'The problem was what to do now we'd caught up with her?'
Brasell got a rope to Astral to tow her, but it snapped, and, deciding it was too dangerous to re-connect it, Brasell stood by the stricken yacht all night in enormous seas.
Brasell described his trawler, which he built himself, doing everything but “turn inside out” during the storm.
“We had one consolation,” he recalled. “We knew the sea couldn’t get any worse. Visibility was almost nil.”
One of Astral’s crew remarked: “Anyone who has never been scared at sea has never experienced anything like this.'
By the morning of Saturday January 27, Brasell could see the weather wasn’t abating, as forecast. In fact, the wind was increasing, reaching 80 knots.
So he decided to pluck Astral’s six crew from the yacht, each man taking his turn to tie a rope around his waist, jump into the boiling water, and be hauled hand over hand to Tawera and safety.
(The abandoned Astral was later salvaged and towed to Pāremata.)
By then, Brasell had been awake for more than two days.
“To put it mildly, we were all absolutely buggered,” he later recalled.
“Soon after we got the last of them on board, I can remember sitting round in the wheelhouse hoeing into a pot of savs.”
Someone produced a bottle of rum to go with them.
When Brasell arrived back in Wellington that afternoon, the rescued crew were whisked away to recover, and Brasell immediately went to sleep on a nearby yacht.
But one of his crew, Ray Clark, couldn’t sleep: His younger brother, Kevin, was still somewhere out there, lost at sea.
The never-ending search
Kevin, a 21-year-old chairmaker from Lyttelton, had joined Arthur Clements on his yacht Husky, from the organising Banks Peninsula Cruising Club, however nothing had been heard from the four-man crew since they left Wellington.
But as his brother, Ray, arrived back in Wellington after helping save Astral’s crew, word spread that wreckage had been found near Red Rocks and Ōwhiro Bay on Wellington’s south coast. Ray frantically joined the search, but the news worsened when it was confirmed part of the wreckage was Husky’s name plate.
On Saturday January 27, four days after the race began, six yachts were still unaccounted for: Raukawa, Ruawaka, Husky, Hope, Aurora, and Argo.
Raukawa and Ruawaka were soon located, along with debris from Husky.
The following day, contact was made with Hope.
And on the 29th, 22’ Auroroa, the smallest boat in the fleet, was located near Castlepoint on Wairarapa’s coast.
It eventually made it to Lyttelton on February 3 after a 10-day ordeal.
But nothing had been heard from Argo and its six crew, despite it being the only yacht in the race with a radio.
On February 6, a lifebuoy with the name Argo washed up in Palliser Bay east of Wellington, along with two cabin cushions from the yacht.
In what remains one of the country’s largest searches, Air Force and civilian planes flew for more than 400 hours and covered 165,000 square nautical miles until February 12 before it was determined Argo must have been lost.
The operation cost the Air Force alone £70,000 - more than $6 million today.
An investigation held later that year ruled the loss of Argo’s bobstay at the race’s start had made her unseaworthy, and she was likely dismasted and quickly foundered on the first night.
In addition, witnesses reported seeing “a terrific lot of boxes and provisions and things” being loaded on board Argo before the race, and it was deemed the yacht may have been overloaded and unstable.
“The disaster was sudden,” investigators concluded.
Argo, from Wellington’s Royal Port Nicholson Yacht Club, was owned and skippered by 41-year-old builder John Young, who’d decided to enter the race just two days before the start.
His crew included 18-year-old Allan Baker, a marine electrician.
After the official search was called off, Baker’s family sold possessions, including their prized piano, to fund further private searches, but found nothing.
Investigators believed Husky also “met with disaster” on the race’s first night.
Their judgment was highly critical of race organisers for not checking appropriate weather forecasts or requesting a coastal shipping report from the Meteorological Office.
“Had it been analysed and properly understood, such a forecast could not, in the opinion of the court, have been regarded as a good one.”
And if organisers had seen or listened to the 8.48am ZLW coastal forecast on the morning of the race, with its storm warning, “there can be little doubt but that the race would have been postponed.”
As doctor Robert Elliott, skipper of Wakarere, told the inquiry, if he had seen the updated weather forecast, “I would not have dreamt of starting.”
Brasell’s bravery in rescuing Astral’s crew was later recognised, the fisherman receiving the Royal Humane Society’s gold medal.
His crew, including Ray Clark who lost his brother in the race, received bronze medals.
Wayne Nolan, who co-authored a book about yachting in Banks Peninsula, Sailing in a Volcano, had lived over the back fence from the Clark family when growing up.
Nolan’s father had been good friends with Brasell since they were teenagers, and Nolan later worked with the son of Arthur Clements, who died on Husky.
“It was very much a port thing,” Nolan remembers, describing the effect of Husky’s loss on Lyttelton.
At the time, the catastrophe was the world’s worst yacht race disaster, and still remains second only to the 1979 Fastnet race in the Celtic Sea where 15 sailors and six observers died in a storm.
Despite this, Nolan, now 86, says the 1951 race has largely been forgotten, with no plans to mark the 75th anniversary in Lyttelton.
“It’s something that should be remembered, because it was quite a tragedy.”
The little yacht that could
One yacht did finish the deadly race.
From a fleet of 20 starters, Nelson yacht Tawhiri was the only one to survive the storm.
When it reached Lyttelton after 69 hours - having expected to arrive in less than half that time - its crew of four had no idea of the wreckage in their wake.
Photos of their arrival show a bedraggled crew in oilskins and bare feet, smiles diluted by wild seas and sleeplessness.
Notably, Tawhiri had also won a race in the opposite direction in 1940 celebrating Wellington’s centenary.
A 39’ kauri racer/sailer, built in Auckland in 1933, Tawhiri is being restored in Auckland.
Josh Markham, whose family once owned Tawhiri, and who oversees the trust now rebuilding her, says the 1951 race is part of the yacht’s rich history, but also an indication of what an incredible boat she is.
“She’s 100% special. And she’s special to a lot of people - she touches a lot of people’s hearts.”
Markham also pays tribute to skipper Noel Brown and his crew for surviving the race, having taken Tawhiri into deeper water away from the coast when the storm hit, riding out huge swells before steering west to the finish line.
“Sailing back then was very brave, because there was no GPS, no EPIRBs, no liferafts.
“It was a pretty heroic race for that crew.”
Markham remembers many trips on Tawhiri with his parents, sailing from Mana to Ship Cove in the Marlborough Sounds, “in huge seas, and she handled it beautifully”.
His family owned Tawhiri for more than 20 years, but it fell into disrepair after they sold it.
A Nelson trust rescued it in 2008, but a lack of funds meant it continued to deteriorate.
Markham watched this happen while visiting his father, Peter, who had terminal cancer, before finally deciding to save it.
“And I said to dad, ‘Look mate, we’re going to do this, we’re going to contact the owners, and we’re going to take her back.’
“And he turned to me and said, ‘What are you - bloody stupid?’
“But I guess that’s part of the Markham blood is that we’re pretty pigheaded and pretty stubborn.”
Just before Tawhiri was trucked to Auckland for restoration, and three months before Peter died, Josh took his father to the yacht, hoisted him on board, and photographed him at the tiller.
Tawhiri’s cabin top and deck have now been removed, ready for its hull to be re-framed.
Markham estimates the restoration will take 10 years, and a small fortune.
But he says he’s “silly enough to do it,” and committed to returning Tawhiri to her former state, in honour of the yacht that made it when no others could.