Chapter Twenty Seven Roaring Forties on agitator cycle

It was times like these near-disasters that forced me into dreaming of better places.

It all began in my teens when I was training for 100 mile races in New Zealand logging up to 400 miles a week on my racing bike. My daily schedule was to bike the 20 miles to work, have a swim in the tide to refresh myself, work all day boatbuilding, have another swim before biking home, have dinner and then I got to go out and do my training. One week end I biked home on the Friday night, had dinner then biked the 72 miles to Nelson over two great mountain climbs, raced a two stage club race to Motueka and return on the Saturday then rode a leisurely 72 miles home with the lads on the Sunday, sprinting into every town’s speed limit sign as if it was an imaginary finish line..

Building up to the big races it was more important to get the miles in the legs than sleep, so often when riding on the homeward stretch on a cold winter’s night I would ‘hit the wall’ having 5 to 10 miles still to go.. This weekend was a particularly hard ride and I found myself spent of every available energy factor, tired and having trouble keeping up with my training mates. A pint of milk and a Mars bar would help in those cases but being unprepared and out there in the whop whops there was nothing. So as I had learned to do when I “hit the wall” under extreme physical duress I resorted to dreaming in my mind of already being home, envisioning myself taking my clothes off, throwing on PJ’s and climbing into a warm bed and pulling the covers up around me. I had learned that by doing this before long the miles would pass without my body being focused on its agonies and distress and suddenly I would be in that warm safe place called bed. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was creating my preferred reality by mentally visualizing and overlaying another one over the current environment. Nor was it something I ever did willingly. I had to be pushed or forced into it to escape the discomfort reality I was in.

For people who are into the bible it is also there, article, so we assumed the French were keeping it a secret for reasons we could easily imagine.

Rapa was now an even more forbidden place, because the French had been testing atomic bombs at Moruroa, and had prohibited entry to a zone of 600 miles radius of the atoll. Rapa lay within that zone. But a bomb or two was not about to deter us; instead it would add a little spice to the venture.

For a sailing vessel the shortest route between two places is hardly ever the quickest. Choice of route depends on the predominating winds and instead of a straight line the course is an arc, known as a Great Circle course. When choosing a route for a passage the modern yachtsman uses the book “Ocean Passages of the World” containing information on winds gathered over the last two hundred years.

In the days of sail, commercial sailing ships discovered the quickest routes according to the prevailing winds at the various times of the year, and these were passed from skipper to skipper till they were gathered together in books. For some of them the mileages might be half as long again than for a more direct route but the longer one would have favorable winds and so be faster.

The captains of clipper ships taking wool and grain to Britain from Australia and New Zealand found the quickest way was eastwards towards Cape Horn, in the latitudes of 40 and 50 degrees south. Down there, the books said, westerly gales blew almost continuously.

So even though Rapa lay at latitude 27 degrees 35 minutes south, the quickest way there for us would be by going south from New Zealand well into the forties, catch those winds westwards to about longitude 148 degrees west and turn left and "up" to Rapa rather than to travel there more directly through the ‘variables’.

There was another reason for the venture. Those westerly gales in the forties whipped up huge seas, waves that were all the larger for having fetches of thousands of miles to build up in. Some say they are the biggest waves in the world, and the fastest moving. It was these legendary and formidable seas that Arthur Piver wanted to try out in the original ‘Lodestar’ trimaran. He believed a light trimaran could surf on these gigantic waves that paraded endlessly around the world and "quarter" them as a surfboard rider does, so gaining an additional 25 per cent speed. He said the waves had no landmass to impede their endless march around the world, and it might be possible to ride one for miles at a time. In this way he predicted trimarans could achieve runs of 1000 miles a day.

In the Pacific we had surfed on the normal trade-wind seas, waves that moved at about 15 knots. These were set up by winds blowing at about 15 or 20 knots. (The speed of a wave depends on the strength of the wind and distance the wind has to build it up — known as “the fetch”. Gales of 60 knots blowing over a fetch of 1300 miles will eventually produce waves, which travel at 60 knots.)

In the force nine winds (about 45 knots) which we were led to believe were common in the forties, the speed of the waves would be about 40 knots. If Piver could have ridden these waves continuously — and had managed to quarter them — -it might indeed have been possible to achieve 1OOO miles a day. In Piver’s theory anyway.

At that time the fastest known day's run under sail was 438 miles, recorded by one of the clipper ships, and it just didn't seem possible that anything could equal that. Our antique by now Lodestar class trimaran was prone to broaching but overlaying that we had youthful exuberance on our side, the fact that we knew no better…and neither did anyone else..., like many others, we were inspired by Piver.

Well . . . there was only one-way to find out.

Storms around the New Zealand coast that autumn were the worst in living memory. One of them as I mentioned had sunk the inter-island ferry ‘Wahine’ in Wellington Harbor with the loss of 51 lives.

Yet it was as common for the ‘Wahine’ to enter ‘Windy !"#"$"%&' Wellington’ harbor in 100-knot winds as it was for school children to dart from shop front to shop front to get home in 100 knot winds. Cook Strait had seasoned us too.

But unworried David Pat and I set off on May 16, out into Cook Strait then southwards, with the wind behind us. As usual we were all miserable for the first few days getting our sea legs and preferred to steer in the cockpit rather than below in our newly rigged cabin’s helm because we reckoned the fresh air was good for our health.

In four days we were on the latitude of the Chatham Islands, 500 miles off the eastern coast of New Zealand's South Island, It was a pretty remote spot, and we decided to pay the islanders a visit.

Mainsail reefed and waters getting colder, the dark outline ahead of the Chatham Islands.

We approached the main island late in the day but our small scale chart which sort of covered the whole of the Southern ocean did not list the harbour and the only township of Waitangi, so we hove-to overnight. By morning we had drifted so far back that we had to spend another day tacking towards the island again. This happened twice and then we decided to hell with it and sailed off eastwards along the rocky southern coast.

The Chatham Islands are rugged and cold, and a hardy group of people and remnants of the original Moriori’s remain loyal to them, eking out an existence from farming. According to our school lessons the peaceful Moriori had populated New Zealand before the Maori arrived with their cannibalistic habits and some time later the last of them escaped to the Chathams. At the time we passed by thick beds of rock lobsters which had recently been found around the islands' rough coasts and the last of the Moriori as well as fishermen from the mainland were risking their lives (and sometimes losing them) to make fortunes catching this delicacy for the highly profitable American market.

We passed many buoys marking Cray pots and the wake that they made indicated a strong tidal rip, or quite possibly signs of the westerly current in action. We saw no cray boats in action but as we sailed away from that gaunt and treeless coastline a light plane flew over us, a solitary mechanical bird come to inspect invaders, then return to its dark castle.

When it left us we felt curiously alone.

We were at about 43 degrees south with light northerly winds, sailing in gentle seas. "Where are the westerlies?" grumbled David, and plotted a course that would take us even further south. Down and down we went, steering southeast in winds that came from every direction it seemed but from the west.

After two days of this the wind steadied in the north- west and freshened. "At last," we thought. We reefed the main, changed Genoa for jib, and turned due east. The barometer was dropping and black clouds were building up. We were now 46 degrees south.

Suddenly the wind dropped. We were becalmed in the heart of the legendary Roaring Forties, flopping around under a dense black sky with the barometer still falling. Obviously, we thought, a real big westerly is brewing. We thought about now was a good time to start looking through some old-time sailing books to interpret the weather signs.

There were all the old rhymes:

"Red sky in the morning, sailor's warning,"

Red sky at night, sailers’s delight”).

Well, we were quite familiar with that one, AND the ominous red sky that morning had prompted us to find out more.

"Long foretold long last,

"Short notice soon past,"

Like a haunting superstition, those rhymes rang out a daunting theme that seemed to be scheduled on our menu right now, all the bad bits, anyway. We began to have a few doubts about our wisdom in coming here. And still the barometer kept dropping.

Then in from the west came an even lower, even blacker bank of clouds, threatening and frightening. With it came a few light puffs from the west. With some trepidation we got the twin-jibs working, each 120 square feet set off the bows, for running with the wind.

Then the barometer started to rise.

And a quatrain was there to fit it.

"...First rise after low indicates a stronger blow..."

Now we really thought we were in for it.

But the wind lifted only slightly, and the big black cloud passed. We were still doing only four knots, so decided the big storm was not to be, tossed caution aside and hoisted the 4 oz 600 square foot storm spinnaker.

During the day we began to pass Japanese fishing floats in a line till at the end we found a most unusual one. It looked like a buoyed miniature light house and it was too tempting to pass up. Once onboard we noted the counter weight was an enclosed battery.

Dawn, and another red sky, rain and then more black clouds.------hang on, it rained, what was that about rain?

"If the rain comes before the wind,

“Your topsail halyards you must mind;

"If the wind comes before the rain

"Your topsail halyards, you can hoist again,"

The suspense was nerve wracking and the bit about “Long foretold long last” was mounting in strength.

The wind had picked up gradually, and was now about 18 knots. Highlight was running quite nicely. The wind picked up further through the day, and by late afternoon we were starting to slide down the fronts of waves as they built up. Surfing is exhilarating. When it happens you can feel the wave pick the craft up bodily and then she accelerates, borne along on the wave. But these were only occasional surfing runs, with the boat stopping as the wave ran away beneath her. Then the sail would fill and she would pull away again.

By early evening the wind is up to force seven (about 35 knots) the seas are up to 15 feet high, and the yacht is surfing more often.

Frequently we miss getting it exactly stern-on to the waves and the yacht broaches, the wave pushing the stern around so she slews into the trough, throwing us all out of our bunks, and all the food containers out of the galley lockers. So much for Piver’s ‘quartering the waves’ in a Lodestar. The wind shrieks in the rigging and flogs the sail, vibrating the whole boat from stem to stern till, agonizingly slowly, she swings back on course, the kite fills with a loud crack, and off we go again.

We discover the hard way that once the boat begins to broach we have lost control. It seems that this is the result of a design fault. No matter how much the wheel is twirled she will not come back on course once the wave starts to swing her. You have to sit and wait till she has gone all the way, endure the vibrating and let her come around in her own time. Then make sure you catch the next wave right.

At midnight the wind is up to force eight (about 40 knots) and the boat is surfing on every wave—including the ones we broach on. It is a clear night and we steer by compass from inside the cabin, monitoring the feel of the yacht by the seats of our pants, and trying to correct course before each wave picks us up.

These waves, about 20 feet high, take us surging along for as much as a minute, though it seems a lot longer, and the needle of the speedometer swings around quickly. Often it reaches 20 knots, and there are spectacular luminescent wakes like thousands of glow worms trailing from the sterns.

Steering is a matter of trying to sense which way she will try to swing, twirling the wheel to correct it, and when the wave lifts her just sitting and enjoying the sensation. When the wave passes away beneath the yacht she settles back into the water like an old duck settling on a pond, and we wait for the next wave.

Now and again a wave breaks beneath us. We burst out laughing as the swirling foam, half air half water, makes for a bumpy, noisy ride, as if the yacht has been let loose on a gravel slide.

Extra sheets on the storm spinnaker surfing at 20 knots in the ‘roaring forties’

Another day dawns, still with winds at a steady force eight. Some of the big seas are about 30 feet high now. We go topsides and make fast extra sheets to the clews of the spinnaker, in case of chafe.

On we go, surfing with a rush, wave after wave surging the yacht forward with a burst of acceleration. The log at noon shows we have made 263 miles since noon yesterday, and it feels like it. Our shoulders ache after only two hours at the wheel.

And now we start running into freak waves, walls of water that suddenly erupt 10 feet high in front of the yacht. She dives straight in, buries her bows, and comes to a dead stop. Swirling foam covers the deck, a whiteout for the helmsman. He has to steer by the compass till it clears.

Highlight goes into a broach while surfing; leaving the sea behind as if a bulldozer had plowed through

Broaches at these speeds are nerve wracking. Our laughter and exuberance is beginning to be tinged with more sober thoughts and concerns. We are not overjoyed with suddenly finding ourselves spinning out of control at 18 knots and being thrown across the cabin. When she stops we're suddenly aware of the full force of the gale outside, which doesn't seem to be much while we're running with it. But when we stop it becomes a wild thing shrieking through the rigging and flogging wildly at the sail. That piece of rag is taking terrific punishment. A prayer of thanks to the sail maker.

Gradually during that second night the wind lightened and then it changed to southeast. We took down the spinnaker at 3.00am and put up the Genoa but the wind - became lighter and finally we were becalmed. We slept long and deep.

Becalmed, reading in the downed main sail in the ‘roaring fourties’

We were becalmed for 30 hours, rolling gently in the swells. After the rush and racket of the storm this was a rest we needed. We cleaned up the boat, aired it out, and dried clothes. We each had a sponge bath, read on deck in a mid-winters sun and slept some more.

The wind returned on May 27, light westerlies and nor- westerlies, some of them barely moving us. We were changing Genoa and spinnaker every few hours, trying to keep the ship moving as the wind swung back and forth, frustrating, half drifting, half sailing. For three days. We were experiencing ‘The calm after the storm’.

Finally, on Friday, May 31, the wind strengthened from the northwest, up to force five-six (.20-25 knots), and we changed the Genoa for the jib. We were about 44 degrees 21 minutes south, but not too sure of that because the sun is so low in the sky even at noon in winter in these latitudes that we could not get very good sights.

Through the night the wind strengthened. We replaced the main with the storm trys'l, and later were forced to reef that. It was another full-blown gale, but unlike the last one it was more from the north than the west. It meant we couldn't run—or surf-—we just had to scream along with the wind on the beam, up and down over these huge waves rolling down from the north.

This storm lasted about a day and a half, and then we had another calm, which lasted about the same time.

When the wind returned again it followed the earlier pattern, light and fluky at first, then steadying and strengthening from the north. We reduced sail, then sat and operated the ship from inside the cabin.

Most of the time we were rolled up in blankets in our bunks. At these high latitudes it was so cold we even had thick socks on in bed. To kiwi blokes who always went barefoot this was certainly very different.……. Off duty crew would read or listen to the radio, or sleep. We read Readers Digest and other magazines from cover to cover, and even knew the advertisements so well we could recite them.

David steering from inside. Pat asleep on the Pullman berth

The helmsman was more akin to a rally car driver, albeit a very cold one, sitting up looking out through the window, steering up and down those waves, with his blankets pulled around him and his socks on. When it came time to change watches he would call to the next guy: "Your turn to drive," The new helmsman would roll out of his bunk and take over, enveloped in blankets and munching an apple or bar of chocolate.

If anything had to be done on deck we found it best to strip and go up naked, or sometimes with a windbreaker on. The icy blast of the gale would be such a shock at first that we would not notice the cold for a few minutes by which time we would hope to have the job done. Then below to the cozy cabin, a brisk rub down with a towel and into the warm blankets again. In this way we didn’t contribute more wet clothes to the bin.

We either had storms or calms. Nothing in between. And no more from the west. Northerly gale followed northerly gale at regular three-day intervals.

Shooting the sun with the sextant presented problems, with a horizon so lumpy it was hard to know where it was. I stood beside David and told him when we had reached the top of a wave so as to get an accurate horizon. The sun moves ever so slowly but even so that small movement over 4 seconds is equal to a mile.

In this storm the waves, instead of coming in regular rows and being more or less of uniform size, were confused and irregular, tumbling and breaking.

Progress was pretty uncomfortable, so we went on deck and took in the trysail and storm jib, and let the boat lay a hull. Looking around the horizon it appeared as though we were in a shoal area, causing the seas to stand up and break. Not just the odd break, they all seemed to be breaking. David and I looked at one another speechless. We hadn’t seen anything like it. We had however, seen little circles of dots on the charts with a note: ‘shoal areas reported’ Perhaps we had struck one of these.

We went below and closed up the hatches. David and Pat went to sleep, and I lay in my wing-deck bunk with a book, now and again looking out the window to see the waves crashing around us. They would come with a hiss and a roar, hit the float with a bang, and then there would be long drawn out banging while they ran away underneath, then another hiss. She seemed to be riding them all right; it looked worse than what we were receiving, so I turned to the book.

A break in the hiss-roar rhythm jerked my notice. There seemed to be a silence, calmness, then rising out of it a low rumble, deathly, frightening, growing louder and louder. I looked up and out to weather. Approaching us at the speed of a runaway freight train was not a wave, but a vertical wall of water, which I could only guess at, at being a good 60ft high. Even ‘Lollapalooza’ meaning wild, unbridled and the biggest couldn’t come close to describing this extraterrestrial monster. On its vertical face torrents of water cascaded down in streaks. Like a wall of water frozen in time rushing at us at breakneck speed. The noise was frightening, and one I would never forget.

It was couple of hundred yards away when I saw it and I am not sure if I went into a hold pattern, suspended in time, abducted, but there is missing time there that I can’t account for. Maybe it is the bodies fright and preservation aspect of disassociation that kicks in when you cut yourself really bad and you can’t feel the pain or when an animal that leaves its body the moment it is shot. Or perhaps like blanking out when being abducted and extraterrestrials take you thru a wall or up to their ship.

Let’s just say this time that it must have scared the living daylights out of me so much that I blacked out till the giant hand reached out, closed around us abruptly cutting off all daylight, and then shook us in an explosion of noise in its darkness. It was at this time I came to, a continuing roar had engulfed me, all around me, even inside my head, it seemed. There was a feeling of helplessness, "am I going to come out of this? Is this it?" The noise went on and on. About this time we must have been dumped and sat underneath a boiling caldron of its white magic of washing machine agitation. I had no idea where I was, if I would see daylight again or even if I was upside down.

I knew that the moment all trimaraners dread had come to us. Would she or wouldn’t she. Is this really the end.

What a hell of a place to flip upside down. In the middle of nowhere. It’s a bloody marine desert down here and it’s the fuckin’ middle of winter. There is no way out of here.

As quickly as it began the noise was turned off, and it was light again, for a moment I knew no sensation, then it seemed that everything was normal, but...

The pots and pans on the chart table/counter were originally to port. The small plastic bowl in the shelf above had been in the cupboard opposite.

Pots and pans, dishes, packets, bottles were all over the galley counters and the cabin sole. Among them Pat was stirring, rubbing himself, an amazed look on his face.

David was under my Pullman berth and exclaimed “Holy fuck, what was that?”

Just above me, on the cabin ceiling, there was a line of rusty wetness that hadn't been there before. The water that made it had come—could only have come from the little water trap which was part of the port side cabin sliding window-frame. The trimaran had been tipped over so far, more than 90 degrees, that the water had fallen out of the trap downwards to the roof. The yacht was suspended for the time it took the water to run 30 inches, and then flipped back and dumped right side up. God knows how far she fell. Checking outside, the plywood skin of the starboard float was fractured along a bulkhead by the force of it as it was dumped on its side in the trough.

We were in luck though, in many ways. Besides me on the wing deck berth lay the Honda motorcycle. It had been to leeward. Had it been to windward it would have let loose exploding across the cabin, taking the both of us out and then no doubt dropping down onto Pat.

We knew that the moment all trimaraners dread had come to us. The Gods had smiled on us. We were still upright, and in a marine desert where no planes or ships passed it would certainly have been---another trimaran missing.

Months later we found in Hawaii an old chart of that region of the southern ocean which showed shoal water in the area where that freak wave got us. Shoal water would account for those irregular, breaking seas, and it could quite easily have caused a freak wave to build up.

However, I really don’t think that is what caused it, as enticing as it sounds. An Oceanographer told us that differences in temperature at varying depths could cause the same phenomena and me thinks that is where all those ‘shoals reported’ had come from too.

The only damage seemed to be the broken plywood of the float, it wasn't letting water in, but we had a lot of cleaning up to do, A bottle of soy sauce had broken, and a jar of honey, and these mixed with other food to cause a nauseating mess splattered over the starboard side of the galley.

When it was done we decided to get the hell out of this hostile place. We had had enough. No matter that the gale is coming from the north, turn into it and battle through those breaking seas, up to where the sun shines and the winds are gentle. For if we didn’t, we would just as likely be making love to the penguins on an ice flow to keep warm.

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