A wild ride
My eyes are fixed on a place of buttock-clenching terror. I'm looking at the top of the 45-metre-tall mast of the super-maxi yacht Wild Oats XI and shivering with the thought of what it must be like to be perched there in a storm.
How the mast would sway like a crazed pendulum, and sea spray would sting my hands and face.
How it would all be even more daunting if I were up there at night, being tossed about like a bug clinging to a blade of grass.
Fortunately, such terrors will remain an entirely abstract concept, because my feet are planted firmly on dry land and the mast is lying horizontally, on trellises beside a dock in the Sydney suburb of Woolwich.
Wild Oats' owner and one of Australia's richest men, Bob Oatley, is of a similar frame of mind. 'There's no way in the world you'd catch me going up there,' the 78-year-old says emphatically. 'The guys at the top get the bejesus knocked out of them.'
Wild Oats is undergoing routine maintenance work, and its mast and keel have been detached.
But at 1pm on Boxing Day, the sleek 98-footer (30 metres) will line up for the start of the 62nd Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race, one of the world's classic blue-water challenges. Having won the 628-nautical-mile race last year, Wild Oats will be looking to rewrite history with back-to-back wins - a rare feat last achieved in the early 1960s. It will be one of a fleet of 87 yachts setting off for Tasmania.
Downstairs in the hull are narrow bunk beds in which exhausted sailors try to grab some sleep. Much of their waking hours are spent hauling the yacht's 10 giant sails from their storage space in the hold.
'Each sail weighs up to 200kg,' says skipper Mark Richards. 'You need six to eight guys to get one of them from down here onto the deck.'
Wild Oats is built on an epic scale. The spinnaker sail covers 760 square metres and the mast is so tall that it slides beneath Sydney Harbour Bridge with only three or four metres to spare.
The ocean can still hold some surprises, even for a yacht as large and powerful as Wild Oats.
During last year's Sydney to Hobart race, the vessel hit a sunfish - a giant creature that resembles a floating boulder. 'We cut it in half - there was blood everywhere,' Mr Richards said.
But not even the prospect of colliding with seagoing monsters can dissuade Mr Oatley from investing some of his considerable fortune in yachts like Wild Oats.
'It's been my passion since I was a kid,' he says. 'I started off with a canoe when I was growing up.
'I ended up with the best racing yacht in the world.'
