RogueWave by Aulan Fitzpatrick 360-degree roll sweeps Sorcery clean
RogueWave by Aulan Fitzpatrick
360-degree roll sweeps
Sorcery clean
In April of this year, I heard the
C&C 61 Sorcery was recruiting a ferry crew for the return trip from Tokyo
to Los Angeles, in preparation for the 1976 Tahiti Race. The chance to make a
fast Pacific crossing in an undoubtedly solid sled was too good to pass up.
After preliminary introductions, I found myself on the way to Japan.
Sorcery wintered in the Aburatsobo
Yacht Basin, near Tokyo, after her victorious Hawaii-to-Okinawa Race of 1975,
and had suffered the usual wear and tear of unused boats. It took us a week to
commission and provision her for the crossing, but by mid-April we were ready to
make sail. On board were Jake Woods, her owner; Bob Dickson, Ray
"Shooter" Hayes, and myself as watch captains; Saito Siego, a
Japanese boat designer and sailor; Mabel Walters, the cook who happened to be a
ham radio operator; two Canadians, Jim Fry and Ted Rogers; Ramona Walters,
Mabel's daughter, as an able-bodied hand; Vicki Allan from Lahaina; and Ben
Choate, the radio man.
Bob Dickson has been Sorcery's
sailing master for two-and-a-half years, and Fry and Rogers had sailed with him
once before on a coastal delivery. Vicki Allan had raced Sorcery also, while
for Ben, Mabel, Ramona, and Saito, this was to be their first bluewater cruise.
As we prepared for the departure,
the "foot-a-day" Pacific crossing record of a Japanese-sailed Ericson
39 1urked in the backs of our minds. We were certain we could better that,
al-though there was common consent that this was not going to be a race. We
agreed that with six relatively inexperienced hands scattered through the
three-watch system we would not set 'chutes, we wouldn't push the boat to the
white-knuckle point, we would keep safety ahead of speed when weighing
sail-change decisions, and we would not go above latitude 40N.
On April 21 we left Yokosuka in a
cloud of high hopes, only to find that the sea beyond Nojimo Saki, the
peninsula that protects Tokyo Bay, was hot, windless, and extremely lumpy. For
two days we motored due east, basking in an unusually warm Japanese spring, and
putting miles between ourselves and the cyclone belt. Then "747"
brought the wind and with a full main and #1 jenny we began our northing,
arcing up to the great circle that Shooter Hayes computed. The sky was
brilliant blue, the temperature 68 degrees, and Sorcery was footing in grand
style with 747 trailing along behind.
For her transpacific delivery
Sorcery was equipped just as she is for offshore racing. We carried 23 sails,
from the 2.2-ounce light #1, to a 12-ounce storm trysail. There were three
selfinflating life rafts aboard, extra diesel in eight jerry cans and two
55-gallon drums lashed on deck in the athwartships cockpit. For communications
we had VHF/FM and single sideband radios, and a ham set, plus the ELT homing
beacon. Sorcery wore a standard marine barometer on the navigator's bulkhead,
and a barograph for the double-check. Although we carried loran C, we did all
our navigation celestially, and the great circle computations were done daily
with a Hewlett Packard 65 calculator. All in all, as we began to lap up the old
Pacific, we were confident that no sailing vessel had ever set out with better
equipment, nor a better opportunity to chalk up a fast passage.
The first week of sailing was one
of perfect reaching conditions; our new shellbacks began to pick up their sea
legs and the old hands put in some good sea-going relaxation. Saito and Jake
managed, despite their consummate skill, to land a whole school of albacore
which Saito inscrutably hacked and chopped for Mabel. The job made him a
shoe-in for the "Favorite Japanese on Board Award," to be presented
upon our arrival in California. Others garnered such honors as "Best
Snorer," "Bloodshot Sextant," "Smelliest Seaboot,"
"Forbidden Forepeak Forager," and "Best Shower on Deck"
awards. Sorcery, after much deliberation, was chosen unanimously as the
"Most Popular Yacht of the Trip."
The only low point in crew morale
came when the unreconstructed Scot on board convinced the cook to make
porridge, then talked three unsuspecting mates to share it with him. So while
the rest of the crew scoffed off baconandtwo, over-easy, with toast, three porridge
patrons sat grimly in the corner, begging for mercy. Tears were of no avail,
the cook stood fast, and what we ordered, we ate. A better hullpatching
material has never been invented.
On the 10th day out, at 38N 162E,
the wind finally began to build. We steadily reduced sail until we were running
before a southwesterly gale. This was the first day of an almost endless
succession of gales and squalls that plagued Sorcery. Like its successors, this
one swung all the way round-the-clock, and we hunkered down with a deep reefed
main and the very heavy storm staysail. For two days the gale blew around the
compass, as each watch learned its lessons about heavyweather boat handling.
Finally, it peaked on the 12th night offshore, with the averaging wind-speed
indicator stuck above 60, and ridge-sized Pacific rollers overtaking Sorcery
like fast moving granite hillsides, their tops blown flat and their flanks
veined with spume. Throughout the 12th night we heard the real growlers passing
by off the port quarter, the loudest seeming near enough to touch, but always
remaining invisible somewhere in our wake.
For 10 days the winds played
shuffleboard. Sometimes going dead flat, leaving us to slowly swap ends in
30-foot seas, they would invariably build back up to 40 knots as another storm
system bred and bore fruit to the north of us. They always came up on the nose,
then stiffened and backed until we could fly before them with a bare stick arid
a storm staysail. By the 20th day, the occasional splash flooding in the
cockpit and the howl of the big gusts through the rigging would not rouse the
hard-core gamblers from the gin-rummy in the galley, and the loudest cries of
alarm were those of the impecunious Pommie, as I lost once more to colonial
cardsharks.
On the 20th day after a good deal
of democratic discussion, we reduced sail to the storm trysail only. The
barometer had locked itself in the bilges several hours earlier, resting
uncomfortably at 29.34, but was beginning to rise, and the occasional squalls
were peaking into the 50-knot range. Somewhere to the north there was real
weather, and the seas were thundering through in sets that measured 15 to 25
boat lengths between the crests. It was five-minute weather. We got five
minutes of dryness when we came on deck, then two hours and 55 minutes of cold,
wet, but exhilarating sailing.
Our technique for the entire period
of storms was to run with the prevailing wind and wave set on the starboard
quarter, holding a fair course and surging down the faces of the rising swells.
As the crests caught us, they would kick the stern over, and Sorcery would
round up slightly till she luffed, then she would fly along with the top of the
wave. When the crest passed we would trick her helm down to port slightly and she
would slide nicely down the backside, as the wave gave her a foam bath for her
troubles. Steering was never difficult in these gale conditions, but it did
require some concentration, and by the 10th day of real wind, everyone on board
had put in many hours of heavy-weather helm time. By dusk, on the 20th day,
Sorcery and 747 were well above 40N, driven up by the wind and set, despite our
continual sliding off for a southing, and everything had settled into a
workable, if, hard-working ship's routine.
At 50 minutes after midnight on the
21st day, Bob Dickson roused my watch for the delightful one-to-four stint on
deck. Topside, Ted Rogers was at the helm, with a very cold Ramona Walters
sharing the bathtub with him. Ted was attached to the stern pulpit with a
safety line, and Ramona's harness was clipped to the binnacle roll bar. Below
deck Bob settled into the dinette, and Jim, in his famous green underwear was
cutting himself a piece of cake in the galley. For once, the
Japanese-jack-in-the-box, Saito san, was not first out of the rack, and I stood
at the base of the mast bracing myself with a grip on the 1/2-inch tie rod. I
could feel the regular motion of the ship, and tried to get back into her mood
while reaching down to pull on my foul-weather gear.
Jake was the first on deck. He had
been sleeping in the "quarter-bath" starboard by the navigator
station when we rolled, and suffered a thorough tossing in the berth and a deep
bath of Gulf of Alaska. When he got to his feet, the weather-boards were gone from
the after hatch, and the little dodger was smashed over the opening. The
stateroom full of water was draining forward into the main cabin. By the thin
slice of a moon Jake could make out Mona lying in the cockpit shrieking in
pain, but still attached to the binnacle bar by her safety harness. The
remaining 55-gallon drum, which had ridden out a week of storms, had broken its
lashings and apparently smashed Mona down onto the cockpit sole. Jake leapt
over her looking for his two crewmen, unaware that Bob was below. He saw Ted
over the side, miraculously hanging on to Sorcery's toerail, trying to stay out
from under her wallowing counter. Jake leaned over the stern pulpit to grab
Ted's arms. Then he began shouting.
Below decks it was bedlam. Bob
Dickson, the one man who had his gear on and was wide awake, was pinned against
the dinette seat by the heavy engine cover/galley counter. That big box had
sailed across the galley during the roll hitting Bob in the face and chest. It
was two minutes before he could free himself and, with his face bleeding badly,
scramble up on deck.
In the stern Jake and Ted
understood that they could not hold on any longer, and Ted slipped down under
the counter as their grips weakened. Bob reached the cockpit and stepped over the
still-screaming Ramona to get to the wheel. It was then he realized that the
sounds were wrong; there was no howl in the rigging. The mast was gone.
Someone was holding me, and someone
was yelling "man overboard," and above everything was the wailing of
a girl. I'm told I ran on deck, then back below to find my glasses while Jake,
Ray and Ben got Ted back aboard. Ted was thrust into a berth amidships, with
Jim Fry for body heat, and we exchanged happy insults as I went back topsides
with splints for Mona.
Ramona was forward of the helm, and
while she cried that we were going to die, I vaguely began to square her away.
"Don't worry luv, your pet Scotsman is here."
Then Bob called "Watch
out," and we were all armpit deep in the ocean again as a roller swept
over Sorcery. The shock of the cold water did it. The clumsy unconsciousness
passed, and I was suddenly cold and in a hurry. Mona was still screaming in my
ear, my arms around her were holding on to the binnacle bar and that frail
little girl was hugging me stronger than any bear. She was half-submerged, with
one leg twisted all backwards as I unsnapped her harness and handed her down to
her mother and Saito. We splinted her leg with table fiddles, and tied both legs
together, then jammed her in a bunk. There, under the ministrations of her
mother, and the effects of several pain pills, she began to settle down.
On deck conditions were lethal.
Split jerry cans spread diesel oil that was splashed everywhere by the beam seas
as we wallowed in the troughs and lurched over the crests of the waves. Lines
were whipping back and forth and the entire starboard rail was bare, no
stanchions, no lifelines, no rigging. Only the incredible stub of the mast, sheared
clean at the deck, pointed starward five feet above the gunwale. The mast was
held there by the main boom, which had been lowered down to the deck the day
before, and now lay canted over the side, still attached at the gooseneck. The
port shrouds were straining across the deck, disappearing into the black water
on the starboard side.
Sorcery had been truly swept clean.
The antennae were gone, the starboard lifelines, the mast, the cowls for the
Dorades. Even the top of the port grinder was missing, and the entire scene was
illuminated in the mocking light of our life-raft strobes, flashing blindingly
as the two inflated rafts drifted away, trailing their parted painters as they
made 10 knots off into the blackness. That was the pain of the night. Alone,
all alone, we lashed the wheel and returned to the safety of the cabin to wait
for the dawn.
Below decks Sorcery was a shambles,
but in no immediate danger. We had only been inverted for two or three seconds
at the most, so there had not been time for the sea to find the ruptured after
hatch. The water that did enter had mixed with the sump oil and debris and had
been thrown across the overheads and bulkheads. All the lockers had emptied
onto the cabin sole, and no one could guess at the whereabouts of his or her
gear. The sound of the mast's grating on the starboard side was frightening. It
was held firmly in place by the shrouds, the head- and backstays, and the boom,
but it continued to grate against the heavy aluminum strip that circles
Sorcery's gunwales. It showed no signs of breaking loose, instead it acted like
a giant sea anchor, pinning Sorcery to the rollers, like a butterfly pinned on
a collection board. We were safe for the moment, and cold, and exhausted, and
wet. So we did the only sensible thing, we tried to rest. From somewhere a dry
pack of cigarettes appeared, and a bottle of whisky turned up. In the pale
light of one bulb, running on our weakest battery to conserve power, we smoked,
drank and made bad jokes. We sat in numb surprise, amazed that we were at once both
dismasted, and still alive.
Hours after dawn we strung out a 20-foot
dipole antenna along the deck. This wire had come aboard with Ben, and we had
hoisted it up the stick during the early days to talk with ham operators who
were keeping a watch on the weather along the Japanese coast. After the rig was
spread out, Ben attempted to wake up the world. At 7:30 AM the world answered
in the form of a Homer, Alaska, ham operator, then a man in Ketchikan picked us
up, then one on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, and soon a grid was established all
around the pond. I never knew how many people listened to the world going by
before, but that morning we learned to love them all. A communication patch was
established with the Coast Guard, and Mother Mabel settled in to direct the
radio traffic. 747 settled alongside, foraging through our wet, cast-off,
foodstuff.
About 240 miles north of us, the 378-foot
Coast Guard cutter Mel/on was en route to Kodiak. They turned and began to slog
back to us at 42N and 162W*
We were on the fringes of the storm
that the cutter was bucking, and before she arrived help appeared from other quarters.
Early in the afternoon, the pilot of a Coast Guard rescue plane advised us to
turn on the emergency beacon, and at 4: 12 PM an orange and white HC-130 flew
in low from the north, homing in on our radio beacon. They dropped rafts, a
radio, rations, and a datum buoy, then droned on back to Kodiak. We all
breathed a little easier with rafts aboard.
When we were sure that help was indeed
on the way, we decided to cut away the mast. Until that moment, there was the
possibility that we might have to use pieces of the rig for a jury rig, and
since everything was still fast to the stick, we weren't anxious to cut it away.
And throughout the first day of wallowing, the deck was not a safe place for
dazed salvagers. By the time we began to jettison the stick, the sea had
already begun its work.
The backstay had worked loose, and once
the stick began to swing to the seas as they rumbled through, the gooseneck
snapped. Still the mast was held safely above the deck by the leeward shrouds,
the lifts, and halyards, and the heavy reefing lines that secured the luff of
the main to the mast. After five hours of hacksawing and bolt-cutting on the
second morning, Bob, Ben and Saito managed to drop the mast over the side. It
finally went down at the same time we were spotted by the MV Camarra.
It was late Sunday morning when the
freighter Nego Triabunna of Liberia, and the Danish freighter Camarra, found
our piece of ocean. It took Camarra hours however to find us, even though we
were in radio contact, since we resembled nothing so much as a broken wave
crest. She stood by until the Mellon arrived at 2:30 PM, then went on her way.
Throughout the 37 hours before the Mel/on's
boarding party reached Sorcery Ramona had been in intense pain, suffering from
multiple fractures of both her upper and lower right leg, and a broken finger.
She spent the entire time strapped in her bunk. Vicki was battered, and had a
separated shoulder, and Mabel was a walking contusion. Ted was in
post-hypothermic shock, and Jim too was down in shock. Ben had been thoroughly
wrenched, with a very stiff back, and Jake appeared to have broken some ribs. Bob's
lip was opened almost to his nose, and he was having difficulty breathing, and
I could not make my hands and shoulders work as they should. Only Saito and
Ray, who had stayed in their bunks, were uninjured.
When the boarding party, with a medical
corpsman arrived, seven of us transferred to the Mellon and at the end of a
tow-line, Sorcery recommenced her long trip home.
In the days that followed we all analyzed
and reanalyzed the events of May 8, trying to fit the wreck back together in
our minds. We have agreed that Sorcery was the victim of a rogue wave, a wave
that was moving diagonally across the set of our gale's rollers. Ted remembers
watching Mona clip into the binnacle pulpit, then having his attention caught
by a looming wave form that he had not seen before. He shouted, and was pushed
down over the wheel, then everything was numbness as the water crushed down on
the boat, and the deck canted out from under him.
The rig, when Sorcery regained her feet,
was wrapped tightly over the weather rail, indicating that she had spun under
it, dragging the stick through the sea, and snapping it off when the
counterbalance of a 13-ton keel crossed the top of the arc. All this points to
a mammoth force lifting her up, then flipping her over, as a giant breaking
wave could do.
In retrospect it is obvious that we
were extremely lucky throughout the ordeal. We were lucky that way back in 1971
Sorcery had been extensively strengthened with a stainless-steel jock-strap
through her bilges and a wide aluminum band at the gunwales. That foot-high
strip of aluminum might have been the difference between noise and destruction
during the day of heavy grinding by the mast before it was totally cut away.
We were lucky that Ted was
conscious when he surfaced and could try to get out from under the boat's
counter. Sorcery carries heavy-duty, wide, nylon-web safety harnesses, yet on Ted's
the webbing over the left shoulder tore out. That kind of impact could easily have
killed a man or rendered him senseless.
We were lucky that the radio
worked. We were lucky that the mast, once it went beneath the surface, didn't
pop back up through the floor boards. We were lucky that the first people on
deck after the roll weren't subsequently swept away, since none of us had paused
to put on our harnesses or life jackets. With people screaming "man overboard,"
no one took. time to search the chaos below for extra gear. We were lucky that
we didn't compound Ramona's fracture trying to get her out of the sea-filled
cockpit and down the companionway. We were lucky that physical shock didn't set
in until after the first minutes of mental shock and panic subsided. There was
more than luck involved however. Most importantly, Sorcery was as well prepared
as a yacht could be for passagemaking. Even as a dismasted hull, she had the resources
to save herself and her crew. She carried all the requisite equipment for
offshore racing under the IOR, plus some extra lifesavers.
Obviously, the safety harnesses saved
Ramona and Ted. They should be mandatory for all cruisers in really nasty
weather or at night. We learned the hard way, that anyone who is going to
remain in place for a long time, like a helmsman, ought to shorten the scope of
his safety line, so he won't have so far to slide and gain momentum when the
boat cants out from under him. Ted's line was still attached, but it allowed
him to hang under the counter where he was buffeted for perhaps five minutes
before three strong men managed to get him aboard. Perhaps a simple boarding
ladder should be stowed on deck so a man overboard can at least help himself
get back on board.
Our life rafts gave us the worst moments
of the entire night, as they broke free from their lashings of nylon webbing
and blew away into the night, lighting up the North Pacific. They did inflate
automatically, bravo. At least two of them did. But their thin painters parted
and they were gone before they were of any use. Rather than breakaway tethers,
rafts should have stronger and longer painters made fast at the raft and the
boat with heavy snap shackles. That way they could be cast off from either
point easily, but would have less chance to escape before they are loaded. As
for the strength of snap shackles, we saw two of them trolling Sorcery's mast
during the cutaway, so we can't doubt their ability to secure a raft.
The seriously injured crewman on deck
highlighted the greatest shortcoming of our preparedness and that of sailors in
general, our real lack of familiarity with heavy-duty first aid. We did manage
to splint Ramona's leg and wedge her into a berth without significantly adding
to her injuries, but beyond that we were pretty helpless, since Ramona herself
was the person most familiar with first aid. For instance, none of us really
knew about morphine, or exactly how to administer it. Conclusion, know your
first aid kit, and in addition, carry inflatable splints.
If we were weakest in actual first
aid, then we were materially aided by Sorcery's total overkill in the
electronics department. When the emergency and marine sets were crippled we
still had the ham unit that could be made to work, and two people on board who could
work it. We had the Emergency Locator Transmitter, a $75 wonder that broadcasts
a homing signal on the VHF aviation band. If a person is serious about being
rescued before he has to row across the ocean, he should make such a beacon
part of his equipment.
In many conversations after our
rescue, sailors have continually asked us why we didn't heave-to during the storms.
Weren't we really flying the spinnaker recklessly in order to break the record?
Didn't Sorcery just broach in extreme conditions? Again, we never flew a
spinnaker during the entire 20 days, because we did not feel it would be safe
to do so with the delivery crew we had on board. We did not heave-to because
the boat was never in any great danger from either wind or seas. We were always
in control, and under the storm staysail we enjoyed some exhilarating
heavy-weather sailing. On the 12th night there were some huge waves about, but
we never saw them, and we can't say that we had near-misses before the roll of
the 21st day. Usually we were asked about heaving-to by people who
have never attempted the maneuver themselves, especially in a 61-foot lOR
racing boat, at night, in 40- or 50-foot seas. In those exact conditions it was
the consensus of the watch captains that Sorcery and her crew would be put in
greater jeopardy by attempting such a maneuver than they were running free
before the gales, with complete maneuverability and careful tending.
The violence of the wave's impact
on deck was obvious in the damage report. One spinnaker pole, and one reaching
strut, both securely lashed down, vanished. Stanchions vanished. The trysail
vanished. The pulpits were mangled, even the teak grab rails disappeared. Somewhere
in the Pacific another storm sent a freak rolling northward, and that freak
caught Sorcery right on the beam, at her worst moment, poised at the top of a
cresting, 40-foot wave.
One thing driven home by the
incident is that the best modern offshore yachts are probably as strong as any sailing
craft in history. Sorcery shows a few hairline cracks in her bulkhead finish as
testament to the torque induced by her experience, but that is all. The hull,
protected by the reinforcing band suffered cosmetic damage only. The deck
stayed true, there was no glass breakage. No fiberglass shattered. Of all the
parties concerned, Sorcery put in the best performance of all, without question,
through 20 great days of sailing and five really lousy minutes.
*The Coast Guard summary of events record that, "Mellon
proceeded at best speed. Due to extremely high seas, which for most of Saturday
afternoon were in the 35-40-foot range, progress was limited to five knots.
Winds were steady at 50 knots, with several periods increasing to 90 knots.
Damage sustained."
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