Don't the organisers of this event have an "upper limit" of conditions whereby they abandon the race? I would have thought that the resuting "carnage" on the beach would have had the consideration of personal injury to the competitors rise above the desire to continue with the event. What is the situation of "liability" if there is a fatality and the organisers are found to have knowingly continued the event in obviously "unsafe" conditions. If it looked like those sort of conditions for any event in Australia, I know that any organising body of an event would always err on the side of saftey, even if it left some unhappy sailors on the beach. Their insurance just would not cover the losses if the event went ahead, and they could be held personally liable.