Peter Luke, co-founder of the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, died on 23 September 2007 at the age of 92.
At that time he still held a race record that he set in the very first Sydney Hobart Yacht Race in 1945–the longest-ever time to finish the course, 11 days, six hours, 20 minutes. Peter disliked all things commercial and yet still worked for 35 years in his father’s business, which he detested. He loved everything to do with boats and the sea, but he wasn’t particularly competitive.
The family had a home in Mosman overlooking Taylor’s Bay, and at a reasonably early age Peter’s parents gave him a 2.5 metre dinghy with a one-horsepower outboard motor. It wasn’t long before he converted it to sail, hanging a sugar bag on a broomstick, sailing downwind, motoring back upwind, and exploring every inch of Taylor’s Bay.
He acquired a number of small yachts during his first ten years with the photographic studio and on them explored the NSW coast between Sydney and Newcastle. Then, in 1940, he acquired the ship that he would sail for the rest of his life: the Alden-designed yawl, Wayfarer, launched in January of that year. The name expressed Luke’s desire to roam around out-of-theway places; it evoked dreams of waving palm trees and hula girls.
In about April 1945 an early CYCA member, Sydney artist Jack Earl, was anchored at Quarantine not far from where the Tasmanian yacht Saltair was also anchored. Earl and his family were planning a cruise to Hobart at Christmas time, and Jack rowed over to Saltair, owned by two other early CYCA members, the experienced Tasmanian yachtsmen Bert and Russ Walker, to look at their charts. The Walkers asked if they might join the cruise. Later, Peter Luke got wind of it and said he’d like to go along, too.
In May 1945 Luke invited the well-known British ocean-racing yachtsman, Commander John Illingworth, who was stationed at Garden Island, to address a meeting of the CYCA. That evening Luke told Illingworth that three of them were planning a cruise to Hobart, and would he care to join them. Illingworth is alleged to have said, “why don’t we make a race of it?”
Charlie Cooper, whose brother was a wing commander with the RAAF, managed to arrange air cover for the upcoming Sydney Hobart Yacht Race. A fleet of nine yachts took the starter’s gun on December 26th. One day later they ran into winds of 50 knots accompanied by blinding rain and rising seas. Many sought shelter along the NSW coast. Peter Luke and his crew on Wayfarer sought refuge behind Broulee Island (23 miles north of Montague Island), went ashore to phone home to say they were okay, then got back aboard to forge ahead.
For the next several days the race made front-page headlines, with yachts feared missing. The drama captured the imagination of post-war yachtsmen in Australia, and from that point onwards the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race and other ocean races became the main focus of the newly-formed “cruising” club.
The Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race has become Australia’s first real carnival, with the largest live audience of any single sporting event anywhere in the world, attracting some 300,000-400,000 spectators to Sydney’s foreshores on Boxing Day. In January 1960, a friend of Luke’s wrote him a letter penning these lines of appreciation:
“Should you never have the opportunity to give Australia any more gifts such as this Festival [the start of the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race], it will not matter, as you have cast the traditional die of celebration on the sea and brought to fruition a thousand sail of the line.”
Peter would have been the first to put Charlie Cooper’s name ahead of his own as a partner in this venture, for he always felt that Cooper never received the recognition he deserved for his role in the early days of the CYCA.
Rob and Linds 