Chris Bowling Retires from Racing in Big Boat Fleet

Chris Bowling – skipper of the Endeavour 24 Corinna in DBSC’s big boat fleet – has announced his retirement from racing, after 64 seasons, the last 10 based at DBSC. He started sailing aged 9, at Dover in the south of Tasmania, in flat-bottomed dinghies called Rainbows, and is especially proud of his first trophy, in the Esperance Dinghy Club’s forward hand race, in 1956. At boarding school in Hobart 6 years later Chris maintained his own Rainbow, on the Derwent, helped by a family friend, Jim Hickman, whose son Roger, 6 years younger than Chris, was also destined for a distinguished sailing career (and membership of DBSC).

Presentation of IRC division 3 winner's flag to Redrock Communications, Hobart 2002.

Chris gained his qualifications as an adventurer in Tasmania, canoeing the Huon River with wilderness legends Peter Dombrovskis and Olegas Truchanas, wandering southwest Tasmania and climbing most of its mountains, mostly in winter and often alone. At one stage he hitch-hiked around Australia, and worked as a diamond drill operator on the Gordon river dam site. In New Zealand he climbed Mt Cook; Chris remembers that climb as ‘iconic’, the sort of climb that qualifies one as a mountaineer. He backpacked through the Himalayas, reaching Everest base camp, and, in the winter of 1978, pioneered the Annapurma trek, in Nepal. And he met more extraordinary people. He recalls one such:  

…….. a young American hippie in Manali in northwest India.  He said “I’ve got some fresh rubbed charas from up on the hill.  How about we have a smoke?”  We got very seriously high – something I never repeated or wanted to repeat.  A week later he went home and started playing with computers in his mum’s garage.  His name was Steve Jobs. 

Around the turn of the century, still adventuring, Chris four-wheel-drove the Canning stock route solo and completed a circumnavigation of the continent via the Anne Beadell highway and the Maralinga test site, at one stage following wheel tracks in sand for 1,100km, just south of the SA/NT border.

But his most enduring love was sailing, and I asked him for memories. In no particular order, Chris spent 25 years in the OK dinghy class and made the cut for the OK Worlds in Adelaide in 1990; he owned or skippered boats in 15 Sydney-Hobarts and crewed in another 3; he recalls his boat in the 1986 S2H losing her mast in heavy weather in Storm Bay, Chris and crew jury-rigging a sail on a spinnaker pole, and inching her up the Derwent estuary, still the only jury-rigged finish in that race; he skippered an Etchell in the 1991 Worlds in Perth, finishing just behind Jim Hardy; and survived the worst of the worst in the storm-decimated 1998 S2H, with his boat and rig undamaged. In 2002, as skipper-owner of a Hick 30 he broke the 9 metre Hobart record and won the small boat division on IRC. The next year, without a boat for Hobart, he shipped aboard the 60-foot Spirit of Sydney for a month in Antarctica, working out of Ushuaia, and got to steer her around Cape Horn.

Illusion with Tasman Island in background 2010. taken from plane by Richard Bennett.

The boat Chris owned longest was the Endeavour 24, in which he won 14 State and 5 National class titles. Corinna (Aboriginal for Tasmanian tiger) is also the boat he raced for the last decade in the DBSC’s fleet, winning the fleet trophy several times.

Chris also had a life between adventures. He graduated from Newcastle University, and sang in the Sydney Philharmonia choir. This led to teaching music and mathematics at Ascham School, and from there to his on-going work in distance education. In his late 50s, Chris finally got married to Sharon, and five years later they became parents to a daughter (Krisha) and later a son (Russell). In family life, as in many of Chris’ races, he succeeded with a decisive late run.

All the above is a catalogue of events, but it tells the story of a resourceful, tough adventurer, qualities that earned him enormous respect from fellow skippers. Chris would sail Corinna in blinding westerlies or howling southerlies, when the rest of us had headed for home, and he took her for long passages at sea. He could fly a kite solo, and gybe it solo, while other skippers were shouting at the deckie. There seemed to be no mishap of rigging or running gear that could stop Corinna finishing.

I met Chris when, with Don Roach’s encouragement, he joined the big boat fleet in 2009. Much came of that meeting, including ten years’ racing around the Harbour but we also formed a team of two and set our sights on Hobart. We moved quickly and prepared a Davidson 34 half-tonner Illusion for the 2010 big race. Every S2H is a long story; but, long story short, it was a heavy race with a huge southerly on the first afternoon and knock-downs and intimidating seas in the Strait. Chris led us through it all and we finished halfway up the 87 boat fleet. For me that was a dream that Chris had helped bring to reality. Illusion raced to Hobart that year under the DBSC flag, the first yacht to do so. Soon after, in 2011, we sailed my Hood 23 Time & Tide to the narrowest of victories in the Hood 23 States, another highlight for me. 

Illusion crew in Hobart after 2010 race finish.

So Chris has now retired. All sailing careers end, often – as with myself – because the body becomes less willing than the spirit. Chris has also felt the responsibility of his still-young family; his kids still need much parenting.

One lasting memory for me of Chris will be of him instructing crew as they put a third reef in Illusion’s main, somewhere in Bass Strait, in pitch darkness, with the bow slamming and green water streaming over the deck threatening to sweep all on watch into a pile against the pushpit rails. I remember that water as warm, but – when it drained away – the wind left me wet and cold, hour after hour on long watches. I coped and played my part; but Chris led us until we were in the lee of Flinders Island, sailing flat and dry under a spinnaker, with dolphins escorting us. Powerful memories.

Illusion after the start of 2010 Hobart race.

Chris has been a resourceful adventurer and mountaineer; a highly successful sailor at the club, state and national levels; and a loyal and thoughtful friend. He will sail more seasons – we hope many more – as crew. But the fleet will miss Corinna and her skipper, and we salute him. 

Jonathan Stone

For the Big Boat skippers.