KEY POINTS:
They have a combined age of 245 years and a collective tally of 104 Sydney to Hobart yacht races between them, but the three extraordinary old salts of this year's fleet never imagined they would all still be competing into their 80s.
John Walker, 85, and 80-year-olds Syd Fischer and Lou Abrahams are the senior figures in the 83-boat fleet that began yesterday's race.
Victorian Abrahams, who, along with Tony Cable, will equal the late John Bennetto's record of 44 Hobarts, said he still got pretty excited before the start.
"It's pretty exciting and enjoyable to start, but you do get a bit impatient when you get out there with an hour to go to the start," two-time overall winner Abrahams said. "You don't plan for any records or the longevity going every year, it just seems to happen."
Asked if he thought 20 years ago he would still be competing, line honours and overall winner Fischer joked: "I didn't think I'd be alive."
Although he is five years older than the other octogenarians, Walker recognised he would never catch them up in Hobarts, having started at a much older age.
Walker has done the race 23 times. "When I did my first Hobart, I was then 60 years old because I was a late starter," he said. "I said to my wife, 'every yachtsman would love to do at least one Hobart and I would like to do one of them', but as the years went by the one [became] two and three and it just followed one after another."
Fischer, who embarked on his 39th Hobart, said it was a "bit of a luck race". He achieved line honours in 1988 aboard one of his many Ragamuffin boats, despite reservations about whether the yacht would hold together in wild conditions.
"I remember saying to the blokes 'I think the bastard will fall in half if we don't watch it' and it was creaking. Anyhow it got there," he said.
Walker said the race was special because it gave competitors an opportunity to deal with all possible weather patterns.
- AAP
