The 66-year-old is on board Love & War for the fourth time, the yacht he claimed the Tattersall's Cup for handicap honours on a decade ago.

With so much experience to draw on, Adriaanse knows how the race will play out like the back of his hand.

Everyone starts in a great flurry, surrounded by helicopters and plenty of fanfare. Down the coast they go, which Adriaanse says "is still pretty exciting".

Then the yachts get hit by the first southerly.

Adriaanse remembers last year's "ferocious" southerly all too well - it brought "horizontal driving rain" and was almost impossible to look into, leading the veteran to question his decision to race.

"It's a funny sort of thing, you go through highs and lows," Adriaanse said.

"It's amazing how once you weather the worst of that storm, the next day you sail through it and you can have nice sailing again and you forget about that quickly.

"There are many moments in every race that I do where I sort of think maybe this is the last one, but as soon as you get to Hobart you tend to forget very quickly."

It might be a good thing Adriaanse forgets about the hard parts of the journey once he arrives at Constitution Dock - missing the annual race would break up a family tradition.

"You've got Christmas, then you go to Sydney and do the Hobart, they watch the start of the Hobart, and then I get back on the 31st to enjoy New Year's Eve on the beach," Adriaanse said.

Adriaanse's 28 Sydney to Hobart campaigns have come in 30 years - he missed one after his wife's mother passed away and another after the disaster of 1998.

"I did consider giving it away after 1998, but once I got through my two or three months of mental recovery, I decided that the best thing I could do was to keep going.

"It's such a great race and I love it so much."

Adriaanse is hoping to replicate the success of 2006 but this time around the race takes on a little more significance for a different reason.

Simon Kurts was handed the reins by his late father Peter who won the Tattersall's Cup on the storied yacht in 1974 and 1978.

Simon Kurts was unavailable in 2006 when Love & War claimed handicap honours in a tick under four days, so Adriaanse and his fellow crew members delivered him the prized Rolex watch following the win.

"If we can deliver him the victory, his son is board as well, Phil Kurts, that would be a really magnificent thing," Adriaanse said.

"The boat would then have won it four times on corrected time. If we can achieve that goal, then I think it would be a record that would stand for many years.

"The fact that I'm from Canberra, being a four-time winner, that would be even better."