SPORT Witt has mate on his mind

“JUST before I lost Fish I was thinking about the bad Hobart. I was thinking, we are in real strife. We were isolated and needed to be conservative. It didn’t help that we were in the middle of nowhere.”

Scallywag supermaxi skipper David Witt survived the 1998 race and for years it haunted him. Now he’s haunted by a more recent tragedy as he heads back to the race to honour his mate John “Fish’’ Fisher, lost at sea in March this year during the Volvo round the world race.

He was young, brash, fearless and embraced being labelled “a cowboy” by the sailing establishment.

A former 18-foot skiff sailor, Witt was not averse to stirring the pot, making show-pony manoeuvres that irked the old boys of the sport but paid off.

He kept sponsors happy, won events and surrounded himself with a tight group of fun-loving but skilled sailors.

In 1998, Witt, then just 26 and skipper of the 85-foot ketch Nokia, started to make noise in world sailing circles.

But what happened at sea that day and night between December 27 and 28, changed him as a sailor and as a man.

“In 1998 the waves were breaking with six foot of white water on top. It was ridiculous, scary,’’ Witt said.

“When we tried to search for ‘Fish’ the waves were so big we couldn’t motor up them, they were so high.”

Witt has applied lessons from 1998 Sydney to Hobart in the aftermath of Fisher being swept overboard in the Southern Ocean, some 1400 nautical miles west of Cape Horn, in 45-50 knot winds, massive seas and 4C water.