Few yachts in Australia had a better record than Patanela. The steel schooner, a little under 20 meters long with a bright yellow hull and four watertight bulkheads, had spent three decades on hard ocean passages, including the 1964–65 private expedition to Heard Island in the Southern Ocean, when the veteran mountaineer and sailor Bill Tilman took her south as skipper. Those who knew her considered her close to unsinkable. In November 1988 she disappeared off Sydney on a calm night, within reach of the city’s lights, and has never been found.
The last voyage
That year Patanela was bought by a Perth businessman, Alan Nicol, who planned to run her as a charter boat in the Whitsunday Islands of Queensland. To get her there she had to sail right around the southern half of the continent. She left Fremantle on October 16, 1988 with Nicol and his daughter, the experienced skipper Ken Jones and his wife Noreen, and two young crewmen from Taree in New South Wales, John Blissett, 23, and Michael Calvin. Nicol and his daughter left the boat at a port along the way, intending to rejoin it later, and the other four carried on east.
Shortly before 1 a.m. on November 8, Jones called Sydney Radio, the coastal station run by the Overseas Telecommunications Commission. He reported that he thought the yacht had run out of fuel about ten miles east of Botany Bay, that the crew had raised sail and were tacking out to sea on a heading of about 080 degrees, and that they might need help getting into Sydney Harbour in the morning. The operator later said Jones sounded calm and the call routine, and the night was overcast but quiet. A second call asked how far south the town of Moruya was, an odd question from a boat that was meant to be heading north into Sydney. A third, at about 2 a.m., was broken by static; the operator caught a fragment about something three hundred kilometers south. Nothing more was heard. There was no mayday, no flare and no distress beacon.
The search and the inquest
By the time Patanela was reported missing she had been silent for more than a week, and the area she could have drifted or sailed across was enormous. No wreckage or bodies were found. The only physical trace surfaced about seven months later, when a barnacle-covered lifebuoy marked with the yacht’s name and home port was picked up in the sea off Terrigal, north of Sydney. Accounts differ on what its marine growth said about where and how long it had been afloat.
A coroner’s inquest that opened in 1992 found that Patanela went down before dawn on November 8, at some point after the last radio call. The coroner considered the most likely cause to be a collision with a large commercial ship that ran the yacht down in the dark. Critics have pointed out the problems with this: no ship reported a collision or showed damage, nothing floated free from a vessel full of gear only a few miles off a major port, and no wreck has been found on the seabed, where, critics say, nobody ever looked properly.
The theories
Into that gap came the alternatives. Some suspected piracy, others that the yacht was taken for drug running and given a new name and flag; claimed sightings of a yellow schooner were reported along the Australian coast and in Southeast Asian waters. Nicol, according to later accounts, spent his own money chasing such leads. Two writers, Paul Whittaker and Robert Reid, spent three years on the case for their book The Patanela Is Missing. None of the theories has been proved or disproved. The strange radio calls remain the hardest part to explain; Jones’s son has said he believed they were a coded cry for help.
A message from the Bight
On New Year’s Eve 2007, a woman beachcombing near Eucla on the remote Western Australian coast found a Bacardi bottle containing a note in faded blue ink. Blissett had written it on October 26, 1988, as Patanela crossed the Great Australian Bight, offering whoever found it a free sailing holiday in the Whitsundays and giving the yacht’s position. His mother said it would not solve the mystery but was a small piece of her son the family had never had.
Where it stands
Officially Patanela sank off Botany Bay on November 8, 1988, probably run down by a ship. Nothing found since has confirmed that, and nothing has confirmed any of the alternatives. Four people and a famous yacht remain missing.