The washing machine went first.
J
oan Dickson raised an eyebrow when her husband pulled it off the boat. Then the microwave disappeared, followed by the diesel heater and the main saloon table—then the bedroom door! One by one, the comforts that had made Sarau home for 17 years were loaded off the boat, and the pile kept growing. Malcolm Dickson reckons you could barely lift it. Yesterday, we heard the carpet went as well.
“Each item weighs almost nothing,” he says with the matter-of-fact tone of a man who has been racing and building boats since before many of the competitors in the fleet were born. “And then you stack them all together and find you can hardly lift them.” The general consensus across the rest of the fleet is all up, the excess weight was circa 4,500 tonnes.
Boating New Zealand caught up with Malcolm and Joan Dickson onboard Sarau in Opua a week out from the start of the 2026 Solo Trans-Tasman Yacht Challenge. Joan was relaxed, and, if we weren’t mistaken, quietly amused by the whole enterprise. Malcolm was focused and entirely at ease onboard a boat he designed and built himself, on which the pair have spent the better part of two decades.
Sarau is a good-sized yacht. At 16.82 metres she dwarfs the rest of the fleet, and even stripped back she sits at around 15 tonnes. But Malcolm moves around her with the unhurried confidence of someone who knows every inch: where the lines run, which winches carry which loads, and exactly how hard it will blow before the trysail needs to go up. He has been sailing her for long enough that everything now runs by instinct.
This will be Malcolm’s fourth Solo Trans-Tasman, and he will start as the reigning champion. He won the 2023 race with a time of just over ten days. Before that, he came second to his son Hamish in 2018 who raced on Zenith, a boat Malcolm had designed and built for the family when Hamish was still a small child. His daughter had things to say about that result. “She told me: ‘Dad, the last race belonged to Hamish. You need to go back and make this one your race.'” He did.
His first crossing was in 1978, in a carvel-planked kauri sloop with steam-bent frames that he had designed himself as a teenager. Spindrift of Nelson, he called her. He finished sixth on line, and first on handicap. That year a cyclone hit the fleet. Boats were rolled, dismasted and abandoned. It was, by any measure, a wild introduction to the race. He came back 40 years later.
“Life got in the way,” he says simply. “Raising a family, building a business.”
That journey included a waterfront boatyard in Nelson, where Malcolm designed and built boats for decades. Joan ran the office. They put in the country’s first 50-tonne travel lift. Then a consortium of businessmen from Christchurch walked in one day and bought the whole lot.
“Every struggling businessman deserves to get lucky once in his life,” he says, grinning. They retired in their early 50s and went sailing, south of all the great capes, in Sarau.
Sarau was launched in 2002. She has been around the world, through the Southern Ocean, past Cape Horn and South Georgia and the Falklands, and across the Indian Ocean with 20 to 25 knots on the beam day after day. She proved herself in rough conditions, and Malcolm stands proudly onboard her today. Inside, she sports lacquered traditional timbers, and the slightly off-white interior paint is still original. In a House and Garden perspective, she’s a calm boat; solid and unhurried. Below and above deck, she’s a delight. The hull sports lovely lines with a repaint in the not-too-distant past. A boat any owner would be proud to sail, entertain on, and live in.
For the 2026 Solo Trans-Tasman Yacht Challenge, she has been comprehensively rebuilt where it matters.
The instrument panel is almost entirely new, all B&G, with a Raymarine autopilot alongside the original unit that steered the boat around the world and, as Malcolm notes cheerfully, still works perfectly. The carbon fibre rudder has been rebuilt. Both autopilots have been overhauled. The mast came out, was re-rigged and rewired. A new battery bank went in to replace cells that were getting on in years, and Starlink has been added, a wire still running uncapped down one side of the cabin top.
“I took her out 30 miles offshore overnight just to make sure it was working,” he says. “It’s like broadband at home.”
At 79, Malcolm will be one of the oldest skippers in the fleet and, if he finishes, the oldest person to have ever completed the race. He is already, by his own account, the oldest winner by several years. When we ask how he is still physically capable of solo sailing a 16-metre yacht across 1,200 nautical miles, he thinks about it for a moment.
I feel very privileged to be able to come back and do it again.
The genoa winches are still manual, and he uses them. The Code Zero and the big genoa require foredeck work to set and retrieve, and he does it alone. He reefs the main and furls the headsails from the cockpit in any weather. He has four furlers and a trysail that lives ready in a bag on deck.
Joan has heard it all before, but she indulges the telling of it with good grace. She will fly to Southport once Malcolm arrives and sail home with him, which is how these things go. Last time his son flew over to make the return trip. The time before that, Malcolm’s 16-year-old granddaughter came along for the ride and declared it the best experience of her life. Another granddaughter is apparently keen for the same opportunity this year.
The competition is stiff. In Malcolm’s view of his competition, Sharon Ferris-Choat on the Class 40 Vixen Racing is quick and capable. Bill Kidman’s Pretty Boy Floyd is a raceboat. Guy Chester on the multihull Ocean’s Tribute is, as Malcolm puts it, “in a different league” and will be very fast.
Jim O’Keefe, the Australian whom Malcolm beat in 2023 and who beat Malcolm in 1978, whom Malcolm affectionately calls “Young Jim,” has decided he is getting past it and is sitting this one out. Malcolm addresses this with a satisfied smile.
“Nine months younger, so I always called him Young Jim.”
The fleet of 15 that will leave Opua on Saturday is more competitive than any Malcolm has faced. He knows it, and it does not seem to bother him especially. He has a handicap of 0.765 which some challengers have mentioned to us, will make him a winner. Handicaps aside, he plans to sail the best race he can and let the result take care of itself.
Joan’s view on whether this is really the last Solo Trans-Tasman Yacht Challenge is delivered with the tone of someone who has been here before. Malcolm’s version is more considered.
That, it turns out, is enough reason.
Race Start — Saturday 30 May (12:00pm)
Join the crowd and give the fleet a send-off they will never forget! The best vantage points are Opua Wharf or the Opua Cruising Club.
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