Once Frank O’Leary finished popping champagne to celebrate winning the last Sydney to Hobart race, he returned home to Cowes to his usual dad and husband duties.
It’s a routine he’s well accustomed to.
As a professional sailor for about 24 years, Frank spends about nine months of the year overseas, paid to crew in competitions. This includes either offshore events – such as the trans-Atlantic, which takes up to 16 days and which he has competed in 14 times – or regattas, which involves events up to seven-days with multiple time trial, short races.
The 39-year-old father-of-one travels the four compass points, from Italy to the Caribbean, France to Asia, working for some of the richest people in the world and royalty, such as the kings of Spain and Norway. Then he flies home to his wife Vanessa, who runs Island Days, a boutique event business, and his 12-year-old daughter Saoirse, who attends the Village School, to his anonymous Phillip Island alternate reality.
“It’s great to come home and settle into a slower pace, and be away mentally and physically from the intensity and immersion that it is when I’m away at events,” Frank says. “The major downfall is the amount of time away from family. The benefit is when I’m home, I’m home, and there’s opportunities for the girls to travel also.”
While on the island, where the couple have lived for 12 years, Frank volunteers and loves to drop by the Cowes Yacht Club where he has a trailer yacht, to head out on to Western Port for a sail.
Frank grew up sailing in Ireland, where his parents were keen sailors. He recalls one of his first sailing experiences was about age six on the Atlantic, when he was swamped by a wave, “thinking it was awesome and hilarious”.
“I just remember always loving it. I loved getting in a boat and going fast, which is still true to this day. I did more and more sailing and everything else fell away.”
He says being a relatively short and stocky build meant he was a natural sailor, with a low centre of gravity – a good power to weight ratio – and with natural attention to detail. As a teen, “sailing with my parents became a bit daggy” and so Frank took part in courses and competitions with his local Irish yacht club, crewing in open ocean yachts.
At the age of 16, part-way through his second last year of school, he decided to become a full-time sailor and moved to the yachting hub of Cowes, on the UK Isle of Wight, enrolling in further sailing courses.
“I came to the realisation school wasn’t where I wanted to be and I was hell bent on sailing. My parents were pretty supportive. They weren’t saying ‘that’s a great idea’, but they understood my passion and drive and didn’t stand in the way. I just loved being at sea, the camaraderie of the crew working well together, adventure, adrenaline and competition and I loved the fact I was good at it.”
In 2001 he moved to Majorca, Spain, another yachting mecca, where he met Vanessa – who at the time was working on a luxury yacht overseas – then together moving to Phillip Island and Australia in 2011.
He says Vanessa was originally from Melbourne but her family had a holiday house on Phillip Island and for several years they would frequently visit. “Every time I came to Australia we’d come to the island and when we had our daughter we decided to settle on the island,” says Frank. “Moving from Majorca to Phillip Island was easy, from one island to another. I’ve always loved surfing, so the island was an easy sell. The island is also fairly reminiscent of Ireland, with plenty of green spaces and rugged coastline, but with better weather.”
Saoirse for three years has taken part in tackers classes at the Cowes Yacht Club, while Vanessa “loves getting out for a sail”.
Over the years Frank has worked in different roles and different bosses in competitive sailing. He takes part in up to 20 events annually, adding there are a few thousand professional sailors in the world: “essentially we all know each other”.
For about two years Frank worked for a corporate team as a boat captain, on a yacht owned by a sponsor. “These kinds of boats are run essentially as a business, with about seven people in the office working on budgets, PR and project management.”
More commonly he has worked for a wealthy owner, who will pay about five professionals to work as contractors on a boat, alongside their own team, where Frank effectively acts as a coach, to lift the level of performance. Alternatively, he works for a wealthy owner as part of a permanent crew, with the owner opting to skipper the boat or watch from the sidelines, “like having a racehorse”.
“Most owners are venture capitalists. They go under the radar and aren’t well known. I decided a few years ago I was not going to work for people I wouldn’t volunteer to spend time with or like or respect. The majority of people involved in sailing are pretty good.”
At an international level, crew members can be paid from $700 per day up to $5000, with a 30 foot yacht having up to 10 crew and a 100 foot yacht having up to 26 crew, including tactician, navigator, strategist, speed group and mechanical roles. The boats themselves are generally worth eye-watering sums, with an average TP52 race yacht costing $15 million to put on the water.
Owners get their money’s worth. Frank has a long list of wins, not just the 2022 Sydney to Hobart on board the yacht Celestial. He and his crew hold the race record for the Rolex Giraglia, off Corsica, as well as the China Sea Race.
Frank says competitive professional sailing is a different skill entirely to “weekend warrior” sailors. He says being a professional sailor requires “3D thinking”, required to understand the inter-connected relationship of all elements on the boat, able to follow directions but at the same time take initiative and plan ahead.
“It’s actually quite different to the type of sailing most people do, in depth, breadth and detail. We analyse data from every sailing, what worked and what didn’t, and look for fractions, less than a one per cent gain.”
A large part of his knowledge is around the engineering, science, electronics, hydraulics and technology of modern sailing, with boats now vastly superior to those he first raced on early in his career. “Boats now are phenomenally complex. Rigging is a whole science in itself while the textiles in sails are all made out of space age carbon fibre technology. The marine industry is ahead of the aerospace industry and aerospace borrows a lot of composite engineering from marine. The technology is constantly evolving and it’s critical to keep abreast of it. We’re constantly re-engineering to reduce weight and any minor fault becomes a major fault quickly and is stripped down. If it’s not perfect, it’s broken.”
If you thought professional sailing was a life of exotic luxury, you’d only be half right. “It’s not about lounging around having cocktails. It’s a serious professional sport. There’s a lot of sweat, loud noises, grunting. It’s a pretty intense experience in competition.”
While he doesn’t have the training schedule of an Olympic athlete, Frank nevertheless works out ideally daily, whether a run, swim or a gym session. “Because I work with heavy loads and there’s a lot of pulling, lifting and winding, a strong core is important: chest arms and shoulders,” he says, adding that while there is youth in the industry, there are plenty of professional sailors who work into their 60s.
Competing in offshore events is the most unglamorous aspect of his career. Take food for example. Each meal tastes the same: a foil zip-lock bag in which he pours hot water, lets it sit for 20 minutes, and then it comes out as a high energy, high calorie meal. “It always comes out looking like stew. Some are better than others but basically it’s to put calories in your body and generally we’re pretty hungry.”
During long offshore competitions he will grab whatever sleep he can get, about five hours a night, sleeping in a pipe cot that is “pretty claustrophobic”. Regattas, on the other hand, are more luxurious and “we’re pretty well looked after”. He wakes to a breakfast of bacon and eggs, fruit salad or muesli and yoghurt in accommodation generally like a villa, with dinner back on shore during post-race analysis.
Possibly the most unglamorous side is the long-haul flights. He says one of the longest rest periods he has had was on Phillip Island during Covid, from October 2019 to August 2020, where he surfed, took up carpentry and “realised what I’d been taking for granted”. “Travel does get tiring but then I remember it’s an opportunity many people don’t have so stop being a sook.”
Frank acknowledges sailing is not the safest sport and some of his friends have been injured. But – fingers crossed – so far he’s relatively been unscathed, adding “deaths are rare”. “I always have awareness of the situations I put myself in. What is safe and unsafe depends massively on the people around you.”
He has faced a hurricane in the Atlantic, with 120 knot winds and massive waves “blown flatter by the wind”. Of course, he is constantly wowed by marine life and says competing during whale season requires extra vigilance, as the whale will be fine, but the boat will come off second best.
While there is hard work, there is also a degree of grandeur to the sport. “There’s a whole range of different things that make me appreciate the job: sunrise and sunsets, great sailing, when everything is going well and you’re surrounded by friends and you think this is not bad. But then there are moments when you’re tired, cold, wet and hungry and I think ‘what am I doing this for’. It’s a combination of both. It’s a career that has taken me to every continent apart from Antarctica, travelling with friends, doing something I love.”
By Sarah Hudson.
Photos: Steph Thornborrow and supplied.