Peter Kurts and friends to sail no more

by Peter Campbell on 20 Jan 2005 Peter Kurts, one of Australia’s great ocean racing yachtsmen of the past three decades, has sailed his final ocean race.

The two-times overall winner of the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race and six-times Australian Admiral’s Cup team representative died in Sydney yesterday after a brief illness.

This illness prevented the 80-year-old doyen of Australian ocean yacht racing from skippering his beloved 31-year-old timber yacht Love & War in the 60th Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race, which would have been his own 31st (at least) race to Hobart.

His son, Simon, and other 'good friends' sailed Love & War to victory in IRC Division E and the 30 Year Veteran Division of the ocean classic, placing a close seventh overall among the high-tech modern ocean racers – a performance that Peter had predicted.

'The Cruising Yacht Club of Australia is saddened at the passing of a great yachtsman and a distinguished club member,' Commodore Martin James said today.

'Peter had been a member of the CYCA for 38 years and had represented the CYCA in many international ocean racing events as well as achieving great success in local ocean racing.

He was one of only a handful of owners to have won the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race twice over the past 60 years.'

Love & War, a classic Sparkman & Stephens 47, won the Sydney Hobart in 1974 and 1978 and represented Australia at the Admiral’s Cup in England in 1975, and had been maintained in immaculate condition by Kurts as the most loved boat he had ever owned.

'We will give this year’s race a real go…she rates very low under the IRC handicap category,' Kurts said at the CYCA as he and his crew prepared for the 2004 ocean classic.

'If we get plenty of windward work and she has a low rating race, then I think we have a really good chance on corrected time,' added Kurts who also has represented Australia six times at the Admiral’s Cup in England.

His predictions were right, but sadly, Peter did not see Love & War again after she set sail on Boxing Day, 26 December 2004.

She sailed back into Sydney Harbour on the return voyage from Hobart today as he passed away.

Peter Kurts began his remarkable ocean racing career with Mister Christian, a Swanson 36 double-ender, when he won the Brisbane to Gladstone Race in 1967 (he then lived in Queensland running his successful property development and real estate company) and in 1968 he 'gave the Hobart Race a good shake' with a third overall.

Kurts commissioned Olin Stephens, the famous US naval architect to design Love & War in 1973, with noted timber boat-builder Cec Quilkey constructing her hull from cold moulded Oregon pine.

The deck is teak, the interior varnished timber.

Love & War was Kurts’ favourite yacht out of the many ocean racers he has built and he has lovingly maintained her over the years.

In recent years she has been raced sparingly, winning the 20 Year Veteran Yacht Division of the 50th Sydney Hobart in 1994 and this year placing a close second in the Gosford to Lord Howe Island.

The sprightly Kurts had also regularly cruised single-handed with Love & War on the 400 or so nautical miles across the northern Tasman Sea to Lord Howe Island.