This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first America’s Cup contender to lose a match race by shipwreck.

On March 5, 1995, challenger One Australia broke in half in heavy seas and sank while racing Team New Zealand in the Louis Vuitton Cup in San Diego.

Among the boat’s crew was Iain Murray, the regatta director of the 35th America’s Cup, who took time off his schedule yesterday to relive the drama that unfolded that day.

“It was particularly rough seas and after bobbing around for an hour or so, the race committee asked the competitors did they want to race,” Murray said. “Of course, it was Australia versus New Zealand and neither party was going to step down from that.

“Bravado stepped up to the plate and the teams stepped off into a race in 20-25 knots of wind, big seas and a lot of water over the boats.

“We did one lap, came into the bottom mark, nose to tail, seconds apart with the Kiwis and went to turn upwind and the boat structurally failed in the middle and broke in two.

“The skipper, Rod Davis, asked me, as the designer on board, what was going to happen, and I quite smartly replied, ‘we are going to sink’. With that, the command was ‘get off’, and the boat sunk in 2½ minutes.

“It wasn’t much time to think about it. It was, ‘get your sea boots off, get yourself ready to swim and get yourself safe’ because nothing could be done about the boat. It was basically get yourself off the boat. It was rough, so a lot of people got off the boat very quickly and, of course, there were a lot of chase boats at hand.

“The crew basically got to three separate sets of boats and got on board. But the thing that was a little bit scary for a few minutes was there was no headcount, so we didn’t know if we had the whole crew or not. But the boat was gone.

“One minute we were going around the bottom mark and the next minute we’re in the water and the boat is gone. Most of us weren’t even out of the water when the boat had gone.”

The crew survived and went on to reach the Louis Vuitton Cup final in the team’s second boat, AUS-31, losing to Team New Zealand 5-1.

There are multiple factors that Murray suspects led to the boat’s dramatic sinking.

“It probably started the day before the race where we hit something and really damaged the bottom of the keel,” the former Etchells world champion said. “It was a metal thing that was blue. We don’t know what it was, but it was enough to destroy part of the keel and we had to replace that overnight.

“We went out the next day in rough seas, and we had to be towed out through a surf, which is not what the boat was designed for. It was suspected that we probably fractured the boat the day before, and further fractured it towing it out. We didn’t realise that, and then we went and raced.”

After beating AUS-31 in the Louis Vuitton Cup final, Team New Zealand went on to defeat defender Young America to win the “Auld Mug” for the first time.

At the helm of Team New Zealand’s 82-foot long International America’s Cup Class monohull yacht was Sir Russell Coutts, now the chief executive of defender Oracle Team USA.