This year marks the 75th anniversary of the world’s second worst yacht-racing disaster, and yet most sailors have never heard of it.

It has gone unremarked for all these years because a forecast was ignored by the organisers, and a £100 winner’s prize – worth over £4,000 today – caused a certain myopia among entrants.

Those responsible want only to forget it, but it’s worth recalling how those who survived managed to do so.

So, in the Southern Hemisphere summer of 1951, 20 yachts dropped their moorings and set off from Port Nicholson, Wellington, at the tip of New Zealand’s North Island, bound for Lyttelton in the nation’s South Island, 174 miles away.

A trough of low pressure was forecast to arrive that evening, bringing with it strong south-easterly winds and rain. Race organisers and skippers heard that forecast, a general land forecast, and dismissed it as nothing out of the ordinary.

The one the skippers didn’t listen to – a coastal forecast – came an-hour-and-a-half later and predicted a south-east storm in the Cook Strait.

If the race organisers at the Banks Peninsula Yacht Club heard it, or just ignored it, remains unknown, but the pressure was on to hold the race on 23 January as this marked the centenary of Canterbury in South Island, which the contest was marking.

Things went wrong from the start, with a collision between Nanette and Argo leaving the latter with a broken bobstay. Next, Restless was dismasted and retired.

As the yachts entered Cook Strait, George Brasell, a fisherman, sailing aboard Joy, looked at the sky to assess the weather and the sea state and retired.

The rest of the fleet carried on and by the following day were all in difficulty.

Astral was rolled and lost her mast as the wind increased to 80 knots. Brasell had returned to sea in his fishing boat and managed to rescue Astral’s six-strong crew.

Next, the name plate and other wreckage from the yacht Husky, were found on rocks south of Wellington, but no sign of her four crew.

As yachts started to make ports of refuge – days after the start and all with tales of arduous survival sailing – Argo, and her six crew, were unaccounted for. As she was the only yacht with a radio, this was ominous.

The largest Air Sea rescue ever to be launched in New Zealand at the time found nothing.

Later, one of her lifebelts and two of her cabin cushions washed ashore east of Wellington.

A later inquiry into the loss of 10 sailors and two boats was highly critical of the organisers for not acting on the first weather report: ‘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 had they listened to the later report: ‘There can be little doubt but that the race would have been postponed.’

For more than a quarter of a century the New Zealand race was the worst yachting disaster in history, only surpassed by the 1979 Fastnet Race disaster with the loss of 15 sailors and six observers.

The only yacht to finish the race was Tawhiri, a classic 39ft, fine-ended Bermudian sloop whose four-strong crew had no idea of the wreckage left in their wake.

She had chosen a long route – going well offshore – to avoid the breaking seas of the shallower coastal waters and hove-to, riding out huge swells before heading west and back in towards the finishing port as the storm eased.

Until now, the world’s second worst yachting disaster has not been given the memorial many feel it should.

Yachtsman Wayne Nolan, 86, who knew many of the lost sailors, told Auckland’s Sunday Star-Times: ‘It’s something that should be remembered because it was a tragedy.’

Now that could be about to change: a major restoration of Tawhiri has begun and, with it, a tribute paid to the crew who survived by going offshore, along with a memorial to those who never returned.

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