2026 Gold Coast to Mackay

Role: Helm
Skippers: Andrew Lloyd and Mary Ann Harvey

I hadn’t sailed with the crew before, but I’d heard plenty about the boat. Clockwork, co-owned by Mary Ann Harvey and Andy Lloyd, is a South Australian campaign with a reputation for grinding out results in conditions that break other boats — most notably a run of three consecutive Rolex Sydney Hobart finishes through 2023, 2024 and 2025, in fleets where dozens of entrants didn’t make it to the finish. She’s easy to spot on the water too, running that distinctive orange wheel that’s become a bit of a trademark for the team. Going in, I knew this wasn’t a program that panics when the weather turns nasty. That reputation was about to be tested.

The Gold Coast Mackay Yacht Race is still a young event on the Australian offshore calendar — 2026 was only its third running — but it’s carved out an important spot as the natural next step north from the Noakes Sydney Gold Coast. The fleet starts off the beach at Surfers Paradise and races roughly 520 nautical miles up the Queensland coast to Mackay, timed to land competitors right in the lead-up to Airlie Beach and Hamilton Island Race Weeks. It’s become a genuine navigator’s race, with the fleet growing quickly year on year, and it now forms part of the Coral Sea Pointscore Series.

This year’s fleet copped a proper send-off. Winds were pumping from the southerly quarter at the start on Thursday 30 July and, true to the forecast, they never really eased. For a race that rewards boats that can carry a kite hard and fast downwind, it turned into exactly that kind of edition — big miles, big surfing conditions, and very little rest for anyone on board. The 100-footer Wild Thing 100 blitzed the fleet to take Line Honours in a shade over a day and a half, touching speeds close to 30 knots, while further back in the fleet it was a proper dogfight all the way to the finish for overall honours.

For us on Clockwork, the southerly did exactly what southerlies do on this stretch of coast — it picked the boat up and shoved her north, hard. We were running with 20 to 30 knots for long stretches, which for a Sydney 38 fully powered up under kite is about as much fun and as much work as offshore sailing gets. As 1 of 4 heavy-weather helms people, my job was straightforward in theory and relentless in practice: keep the boat on her feet, keep the speed on, and don’t let a gust turn a good ride into a bad night.

Most of the time, that’s exactly what it was — a genuinely epic passage, fast and physical, with the kind of teamwork that makes offshore racing addictive in the first place.

It wasn’t entirely clean, though.

Around midnight on the third night of racing, I was woken by the boat rolling violently underneath me. We’d broached hard while carrying the spinnaker in the heavy conditions — the kind of broach that doesn’t just knock you flat and let you recover, but keeps going. With the preventer rigged, the boat rounded up across the wind, the mainsail backed, and instead of coming back under control we were driven backwards through the water. That load, in reverse, was more than the steering could take. The rudder was forced hard over and the steering column snapped.

From there it was all hands on deck. We got the spinnaker down and smothered, wrapped the mainsail away to take the power out of the boat, and started rigging the emergency tiller so we had some way of steering while the real fix got underway. While the deck crew worked through that sequence, Andy and the rest of the team went to work on the steering itself below — and to my genuine surprise, in a little over an hour they’d found a fix and we were back in the race, helm restored, chasing the miles we’d lost.

It’s moments like that which remind you why crews like Clockwork’s build the reputation they do. Nobody panicked, nobody argued about whose job it was — the deck problem and the steering problem got solved in parallel, and we were racing again before the adrenaline had even worn off. It also wasn’t the only drama in the fleet that night; further back, another yacht lost the use of her rudder entirely and needed a long tow into Mackay with the help of volunteer marine rescue crews, a reminder of just how much load that southerly blow was putting through boats and gear up and down the fleet.

Clockwork crossed the finish line off Mackay in the early hours of the Sunday morning, at the tail end of a night that saw boats streaming in one after another as the fleet worked through the final miles. Given what we’d been through on night three, getting the bow across that line felt like its own small victory — steering column repaired and a crew that had been properly tested and hadn’t been found wanting.

It was my first time racing with Mary Ann, Andy and the rest of the Clockwork crew, and I can see exactly why this program keeps finishing races that plenty of others don’t. When it mattered, everyone knew their job, did it without fuss, and got the boat moving again. That’s not luck — that’s a crew that has done the hard miles together before.

Huge thanks to Irama and Belinda for the introduction, and to Mary Ann and Andy for trusting a new face with the wheel in 20 to 30 knots of breeze on the way to Mackay.

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