Five men who disappeared while sailing a yacht from Hobart to Sydney in 1979 most likely drowned, a Tasmanian coroner has found.
Coroner Madeleine Wilson delivered her findings last month, more than four decades after the yacht Charleston vanished in heavy seas off Flinders Island.
Lawrence Corkhill, 61, his son Jeffrey Corkhill, 32, Charles Davies, 35, Ian McIndoe, 27 and David Symes, 37, were delivering the yacht to Sydney for the Southern Cross Cup.
The crew left the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania on the evening of December 8, 1979. Lawrence Corkhill joined them at Dunalley the next morning.
Charleston’s last radio contact came at 6:29pm on December 10, when the yacht reported its position south-east of Babel Island.
Dennis Leitch, who was sailing about 30 nautical miles away aboard the yacht Chaos, said winds were blowing at 45 knots, with gusts of up to 55 knots.
He described the seas that night as “atrocious and quite frightening”.
Up to 23 aircraft searched more than 140,000 square miles over about 260 hours, but no bodies, wreckage or equipment were ever found.
Wilson could not determine exactly how the men died, but found it was more probable than not they drowned on or soon after December 10, 1979.
She found no reason to suspect anything other than a “tragic accident”.
Laws that took effect on December 13, 1978, allowed coroners to investigate deaths outside Tasmania where the person ordinarily lived in the state, even when no body had been found.
That covered Jeffrey Corkhill, Davies and McIndoe, but no coroner was notified at the time.
Wilson said it “cannot be ascertained why this was not done”.
The case only resurfaced in 2022, when the deaths came to the attention of Tasmania Police State Intelligence. Enquiries found no coroner had ever been notified.
Checks of bank, Centrelink and Medicare records in 2023 found no trace of any of the five men since 1979.
