Avril Sellars is 77 years old, arthritic, and unmistakably the one in command aboard Jabula. When she speaks, her crew moves without hesitation. Crew member Basia Dworak-Bahan is happy to explain why that authority sits so comfortably with everyone on board. "Avril is so calm," Dworak-Bahan says. "She pre-empts any situations and instructs us calmly. If you could dream up the perfect skipper, she is it."
The Scotswoman carries more than four decades of sailing experience and has made the voyage to the Australian Women's Keelboat Regatta roughly a dozen times. This year's 34th edition, held at Royal Melbourne Yacht Squadron on Port Phillip over the King's birthday weekend, drew her back for precisely the same reason as every previous visit. "It's like coming home to a big family," she says. "And it's always good to see the people you haven't seen for a while."
That family feeling, running alongside genuinely competitive racing, gives the event its distinctive character. Around a quarter of the fleet are newcomers this year, yet many of them quickly discover they share connections with faces they already know. Dinah Eagle travelled from Sydney to handle the mainsheet aboard Spartan, a Beneteau 34.7 skippered by the well-known Wendy Tuck. She already had ties to people here through offshore campaigns, Sydney Harbour racing, and the Rolex Fastnet Race. What she hadn't anticipated was the generosity of the host club. "The people who loaned us Spartan, the support, the Boat Buoys fix repairs overnight so the boat's ready to go the next morning," she says.
Eagle is no stranger to demanding conditions. Thirteen Sydney Hobarts and an extensive offshore racing record sit behind her, yet lining up on a traditional start line surrounded by a full fleet, rather than the pursuit format she had experienced previously, was fresh territory. With Ireland and the Round Ireland Yacht Race just two days away, she regards this weekend as exactly the right kind of shakeout before colder, more demanding waters.
Johanna Motteram arrived with Aria, a Bavaria 34 she co-owns with her husband, and raced with their 25-year-old daughter Emma alongside her. The previous day had been Johanna's first time at the helm in a full fleet, and the first time she had taken Aria out without Phil. There were stretches where the boat was moving at 5 knots and she was singing as she steered. When the finish line came, the relief was immediate and real. "We started well, we sailed the course and we finished, without hitting anyone or anything," she says.
Emma watched her mother navigate the marks and the surrounding fleet with a confidence that grew visibly as the race progressed. A year ago, the prospect of Johanna racing Aria would have felt well out of reach. Johanna credits the crew dynamic they built together over months of training, both on Aria and on Siren, another competitor racing this week, though Emma described the whole performance as seamless. For her, the results sheet was almost beside the point. What moved her was watching her mother find her way to this moment at all. "It's been amazing watching her become more confident in the lead-up," she says. The regatta also gave Emma a reason to come home and spend purposeful time with family, something she hadn't done since moving out.
Light winds have made life harder than expected for first-time Race Officer Laura Hughson. The slower pace has also opened up space that more compressed racing rarely allows: long dinners shared between boats, conversations drifting between classes, phone numbers exchanged between women who arrived as strangers. The racing matters deeply to everyone involved, yet much of what this event actually delivers lies beyond the finish line. The connections forming across Port Phillip this weekend, between Scotswomen and Sydneysiders and Melburnians, are the reason so many of them keep finding their way back.
