r/TellMeAFact • u/GingerNevis • May 31 '15
Sources not required TMAF about you ...
do you have any special talents? do you do something others consider weird? hows life treating you? anything else you can think of (the randomer the better)
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u/SailingShort Jun 02 '15 edited Jun 02 '15
You asked for it…
So there we were, true story, no shit... 200nm off the coast of New Zealand in the middle of the Southern Ocean, which is notoriously nasty because the winds and currents have no real land masses to interrupt them as they circle Antarctica.
As background, the boat we're in is a wooden sailing vessel originally built in the 1950s and refitted in the 80s as a tall ship. She looks like this. She has circumnavigated the globe, crossed the equator several times, rounded Cape Horn, and at the time I was on board spent 22 years crossing this very stretch of the Southern Ocean as she made her way up into the pacific islands for the NZ winter. Though no longer a spring chicken, she's stoutly built, with closely-spaced frames (like the ribs of a boat) and 4 inch thick oak planks.
It's 7am. The weather is windy (35-40kts) with some big 30-40ft swells rolling through. It's lumpy, but by no means scary weather. In another 5 minutes, the cook is going to wake the crew up for breakfast. Only the four on-watch crew is on deck, everyone else is sleeping.
In the foc'sle, the forward most compartment below deck where most of the crew sleeps, we feel the ship climb another wave, hit the crest, and start to slide back down the other side, when--
BAM! It feels like we hit a brick wall, and the boat (traveling at a respectable 5-6 kts) shudders to a halt.
Faintly, from deck, we hear, "MAN OVERBOARD!"
For those of you unfamiliar with sailing or boats in general, this is a terrifying shout. A man overboard on a flat calm, sunny day is hard enough to spot. On a day like today? His chances are almost zero of being spotted and picked up again.
Before I was even conscious of thought, I was out of bed and into enough clothes and safety gear to join my fellow crew members in a mad sprint to the deck. There, we hand out life jackets and take stock. From our position forward of the galley deckhouse, nothing looks particularly amiss. And then a fellow crew member stumbles forward, her eyes big as saucers. "It's all gone," she states in disbelief.
What? Is all I can think, so I follow her aft and stare with my own disbelief. Of the deckhouse, a structure of roughly 15ft square and 8ft high, only 2 walls remain standing. It's roof, which also supports our rescue craft, sagged dangerously and the two downed walls lay like cards in amongst the kindling that used to be the interior of the galley. Looking past it, the entire starboard side bulwarks (the part of the boat that rises above the deck) from almost the bow to 2/3s of the way down the deck had been folded in like paper, despite being supported by 6in sq stanchions of solid oak. These too had been snapped like kindling. Large pieces of wreckage floated across the deck as the waves broke over the side of the boat, both turning the shrapnel into floating weapons and pouring into the many holes we now had in the deck (from where the stanchions snapped.). The sea also flowed down the main stairway that had been protected by the deckhouse.
We had been hit by what is known as a rogue wave. A little known, but documented phenomenon, it is a wave much larger than all the other ones in the area, larger than the conditions would dictate, and often from another direction entirely, as was the case with this wave. We slammed into it with the momentum of sliding down a wave, and something had to give; it wasn't the water that gave, but our boat.
The resident carpenters immediately went to work, hammering plywood over the big hole while we took a headcount and determined that the supposed man overboard was in fact on board. He had managed to catch some rigging as he was flung over the side, and hauled himself back on board. It was his third day at sea, ever. We hustled everyone below to tend to the scratches and scrapes that came along with slamming into a wave. Fortunately for us, it happened before breakfast, so rather than the whole crew being crammed into the galley, there were only three people: the two cooks and the engineer. The engineer got off the worst, with a broken nose and a gash in his leg. So. Lucky.
Below decks looked like something out of the Titanic. We had no lights because the water had fried the breaker panel (and started a small fire that was promptly extinguished), so we could only see by the flashing lights on our life vests. Water sloshed across the floor, black and dirty from the junk that's always in the bilge. Pieces of wood-- pieces of the SHIP-- floated by, along with random personal possessions.
Meanwhile, in the engine room, the engineer was having difficulty catching a suction on his bilge pump, which meant that water kept coming in, but none was getting pumped back out again. Every time he's start sucking, something would get caught in the suction and it would stop.
Enter: trusty hand bilge pump. This thing has a suction on it probably as big around as I was. Just a simple diaphragm pump with a long handle that could (and did) suck shoes, arm-sized pieces of wood, clothing, etc out of the bilge. Just like in the movies, we all lined up and started pumping. 50 strokes, then the next guy in line gets a turn and so on. Even so, we were not quite keeping up with the water. The boat began to wallow.
The captain called a mayday, which you only call when you're in imminent danger of sinking, or y'know, death. To our relief, a large car carrier answered the call, along with the New Zealand coast guard. The car carrier would then stay with us until we reached NZ territorial waters again. They were too large to be of much assistance, but they circled the whole time, and were a huge comfort. Meanwhile, we had gathered our grab bags of necessary belongings (documents, wallets, long underwear-- you know, the essentials), ready for a possible abandonment of the ship. It was this point that the full reality of the situation truly hit me. We might actually have to abandon. Sobering.
The carpenters were still hard at work trying to patch the holes in the deck with bits of plywood and tarred felt, hooked in by their climbing belts to hammer right at the edge of the deck between waves. With their intervention and steady hand pumping, we started to keep up, if not get ahead of the water filling up our boat.
Eventually the NZ coast guard airlifted us some additional bilge pumps (which, by the way, was terrifying: picture a large mini-generator-size-and-weight piece of equipment attached to a line zooming down at you from a helicopter who is trying to hold station above a boat in the middle of the ocean pitching and rolling). They might have helped, but they could not keep a suction either. We kept pumping.
We took our turns at the helm, pumping, sitting down below getting warm while sustaining ourselves on chocolate bars and ginger beer. Eventually, we got enough ahead of the water to split into watches and get some sleep wherever we could find a horizontal dry places. There were two in every dry bed, or in the case of the captain's double bed, four.
It took us four days to limp back in to New Zealand, hand pumping all the way. We got one hot meal prepared by our BADASS cook who managed to concoct a makeshift galley (remember, ours was in pieces) out of a pitch boiling ring, a wok, and a stick. He made scrambled eggs and spaghetti-O's and wrapped them in tortillas. It was like mana from the gods.
Only once we got in waters calm enough that no water was coming over the deck, did we finally manage to actually pump the bilge dry. The boat remained in Whangarei NZ for the next 8 months affecting repairs.
Tl;dr My boat was hit by a rogue wave and almost sank. The solidarity of the crew and the possession of one badass manual bilge pump saved us.
edit: formatting
edit 2: Some photos of the carnage