Rescuer who had sea in his blood
ONE of Australia’s best known sailors who won the Sydney to Hobart race three times and famously rescued a group of Tongan castaways has been praised as a “great seafarer”.
Peter Warner, 90, lost his life after falling overboard on the NSW North Coast on Tuesday morning after his yacht rolled on the incoming tide on the Ballina bar, throwing him and a teenager overboard.
The 17-year-old family friend managed to drag Mr
Warner to shore where a member of the public commenced CPR until paramedics arrived. He later died at the scene.
“He was a great seafarer and passed away (Tuesday) morning after a night-time sail up from Yamba on his new boat,” Mr Warner’s daughter Janet said.
“The conditions were favourable otherwise he would not have attempted the voyage.”
Ms Warner also praised the 17-year-old who was on board with her father at the time.
“The lad with my father is
amazing in what he did to bring him ashore. We are so grateful to his sailing companion,” she said.
The Cruising Yacht Club of Australia said the veteran sailor died “doing what he loved best”.
“It is with great sadness that we mourn the passing … of an internationally celebrated Australian sailor and a close friend of the club,” it posted on Facebook.
“Peter Warner was an exceptional blue water yachtsman and won the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race three times aboard his yacht ‘Astor’ during the 1960s.”
At age 17, Mr Warner refused to join the family business, instead running away to go to sea for a year.
His father was Sir Arthur Warner, one of Australia's richest men at the time and the boss of Astor Radio Corporation, one of the country’s largest electronic manufacturing companies.
Mr Warner returned home as a teenager, but fled again for another three years when he was just six weeks into a law degree. He served in both the Swedish and Norwegian navies and learned Swedish to obtain a Swedish master’s ticket. Eventually, he came
home and worked for his father for a few years, but the ocean was always calling.
He spent 30 years living in Tonga and moving around the South Pacific.
In 1966, Mr Warner was captaining a fishing boat near Tonga when he discovered six shipwrecked Tongan teenagers on the deserted remote island of Ata.
The boys had been stranded for more than a year and were presumed dead. When the boys were arrested for stealing the boat on arrival in Nuku‘alofa, Mr Warner paid off the boat’s owner to make the charges go away.