Tonga to Bay of Islands, New Zealand - November
‘Bang!’, the wind hits, the first mighty gust, and within seconds the initial roar rises to a shriek as it screams through her rigging. Our little ship heels alarmingly as the two scraps of canvas take the full brunt of impact of this first strike. With the wind spilling out from the top of her sails, she rights herself easily and, as predicted, the wind settles to a steady roar. From no wind at all a few moments before, it is now blasting in at thirty five to forty knots. Everything is flapping furiously, and hairstyles have definitely gone overboard for now! Wave height building rapidly, and already maxing out at two metres, they will increase when the storm surge arrives. The companionway duck boards are in their slots, protecting below from any rogue wave swamping them from behind, filling the cockpit and pouring down the companionway into the cabin. A wave like that can pour a tonne or more of grey water down the hatch in a moment, with disastrous results. The ‘watch keeper’ in the cockpit is cut off from the rest of the boat by these boards and, if feeling lonely, can perch under the spray hood and slide the hatch back far enough to communicate with those below. Adrenalin is running high which injects its own level of excitement into our crew. Senses are sharpened and any task is approached with a heightened sense of clarity and purpose not normally present. Out here on the edges, there is not much rain, but a few squalls dotted around the horizon. The lowering clouds, pressing down on them, resemble giants of bulging mercury globs, shoving and heaving their heaviness, handing it to them in the dim murk.
A pair of beautiful great Albatross’ skim by at speeds approaching mach 2, or so it would appear. Hugely graceful normally, this is heightened in these boisterous conditions. Travelling downwind, wing feathers minutely altering the flight path, and their wing tips following every little contour in the wave, they are impressive. Just grazing the surface of the waves, up and over, and down the other side, they are moving at an incredible speed. Tracking right to left and back left to right, they disappear rapidly, weaving into the gloom – no backing up and circling the ship in these conditions!
Wave crests are breaking now and tumbling down the face. Even at this height, one of those rising up and breaking at precisely the right moment – wrong moment for our little ship! – could crash over her, stopping her in her tracks.
‘Nothing I can’t handle up to now’, she thinks. Actually, she is rather excited to be ploughing into these seas. ‘We’ll see what happens later’.
White spume flinging off the tops of the waves, is spattering against the spray hood, and darkly spotting the teak of the deck. The moaning roar of the wind, as all engulfing as it is, is a constant. Under this continual hacking of the senses, other normal sounds begin to penetrate the brain again. Whilst at the beginning, when the noise of the wind first hit, it completely dominated, now, it is pushed into the background, so that the brain can function and concentrate on other matters. No doubt this is our way of helping to keep calm in extreme situations.
 White streamers with creamy froth sitting on top, and individual wavelets in between the troughs are beginning to appear, and our captain calls down for the wind meter. Poking it over the top of the spray hood it gives a reading of forty five knots, gusting higher. The first waves begin crashing over the foredeck as our little ship dips deeply into the oncoming seas. Some plunges, she digs her bow, scoop like, into the face of a bigger sea, rising again with water streaming over her foredeck and racing all the way aft, to disappear in a bubbly stream over her stern – her captain opens the sliding hatch a notch or two, calling down for the forward hatch to be double checked that it is clamped down hard and not leaking – it is tight and dry. Our little ship is revelling in these conditions and is quite excited, her trembling transferring from the sails, all the way down to the foot of her mast and into the very fibres of her glass hull. How she is handling them! With her miniscule amount of sail, she is still making five knots through the water. Her motion, whilst at first appearing waywardly alarming, has in fact a rhythmic repeating pattern. As a wave approaches, she steadies herself, her bow rising up the face, momentarily sitting on the crest, then as the full force of the wind tries to turn her beam on, she checks. The wind streaming between her sails powers her bow back into it again, the water mountain passes along her length, and she dips her nose, sliding safely down the long back of the passing wave.Over and over she does this, minute after minute, hour after hour, she will carry on in this manner, and she turns her head to the task with relish – this is what she was built for! Understandably, it is quite uncomfortable below in the cabin and our crew are sitting with their feet braced against the opposite bunk. There is no break, no rest from this motion, on and on it goes, maybe even for the next twenty four hours, or longer, or whatever it takes until the storm blows through, drained, eviscerated. Her crew settle in for the long haul. Sibling crew keeps a constant stream of hot drinks and nibbles coming. All food is served in deep bowls, passed gingerly up through the sliding hatch to the ‘watch keeper’ cowering under the spray hood. She is running quite comfortably on auto pilot, and will probably continue to do so. Driving into heavy oncoming seas places far less strain on this gear than continually sailing downwind in fine weather. The remote control unit comes into its own in these conditions. It is plugged into a socket in the wall of the companionway. Whoever is on watch can look forward and study the wave pattern. If the wind shifts some degrees either way, it can be compensated for by punching in the equivalent plus or minus pads on the remote. The cockpit by this time, with the amount of flying spray, is a very wet place, so the ‘keeper’ can make the adjustments from safety without venturing out from under the hood. All crew are hooked on at all times in the cockpit in these conditions!
It is late afternoon now; low scudding cloud along with the constant spray makes visibility very poor, so a sharp lookout is kept for other vessels. An unseen merchantman is not something they want looming out of the gloom, coming straight at them in these conditions! Suddenly there is a glimmer low in the west and several shafts of sunlight burst through the angry clouds. The whole scene is lit with a dirty, flat, brassy light. White tumbling crests approaching, retreating leaden backs of waves passed, and the darker troughs in between are all washed by this surreal light. Her captain is just beginning to appreciate all the differences when, like the flick of a switch, the beams are cut, and the near darkness glowers on them again. The night is going to be long, as it is almost dark and not yet six. The watch system has been changed to two hours on and four off, and they will run it through the night. As the wind is coming over her port bow, they have backed the staysail, and our little ship is now riding in the ‘hove to’ position. All being well, she will ride out the night like this, without losing too much ground, and a decision will be made in the morning whether to go back into sailing mode. Another wind reading shows it has risen to fifty knots and howling around them. The storm surge has arrived and the waves are five metres plus, with some even higher. The motion is still reasonably comfortable because the fetch in between the waves is so long that our little ship has time to rise up the face of the oncoming wave, over the top, and down its back into the trough, just in time to prepare to do it all over again with the next wave. If the seas stay like this, they will have no trouble. The danger though, is two fold. If one of the larger waves roaring along rises up before them and its crest breaks exactly onto our little ship, there is the danger of being swamped, by the tonnes of water suddenly dumped on to her. This weight can roll a boat, inundate her, and possibly cause her to founder. The more worrying aspect though is that these storms, being circular in their motion, have a habit of the wind changing direction, and subsequently pushing up murderous cross seas. These can then come at a boat from any direction, causing extreme havoc. So far, the wind has been constant, and her captain hopes fervently that this does not change.
Dripping wetly down the companionway, he hands over the watch to WK, who starts upward with a mile wide grin and gleam in his eyes – he loves these conditions! The hatch slides closed with a click and the cacophony of noise topsides is replaced with an eerie stillness below. The roaring wind is replaced with a dull moaning sound, belying the ferocity of the extreme conditions outside. Happy to wash down a biscuit with tea, our captain falls into his bunk. Seconds later, or it seems, sibling crew is waking him. In reality he has been asleep for almost four hours, but cannot believe it. Grabbing handholds out in to the saloon, he looks around in the dull red glow from the nav area. The noise from outside sounds as though it has gone up a notch or two, with the pitch and yaw of our little ship also more violent. A wind reading shows that it is coming in now at more than sixty knots. Some waves have been breaking over the boat, so it is decided to call off the watch, seal the hatch, and everyone below until daylight. Her captain goes up for a few minutes to look out and make sure in his mind everything is safe and secure.
‘Don’t worry’, she assures him. ‘I am quite comfortable in this mode. I will ride out the storm all night’. Crouching under the spray hood he looks out in wonder. Dark as it is, and it is pitch black, with no stars to inject any light into the raging scene, he can see surprisingly well. Walls of water march continuously toward them. Some huge and black as they rise up and look to break, but don’t, others breaking with the roar of an express train and passing by with a loud hiss of troubled, turbid, boiling foam. On the point of turning to go below, out of the corner of his eye, something makes his heart stop. Far off in the blackness, rearing above all the other waves in between, is a solid white wall which looks to be a hundred metres wide. He has heard and read about rogue waves, but never seen one. This looks like one coming now. It is massive and dwarfs everything else around it. Higher and higher it rises and is coming directly at our little ship. The front wall is just a mass of boiling white froth tumbling and crashing down its own face. No boat could survive being caught up in that. Looking down the tunnel of his life, her captain decides he will be better off below and vaults down the hatch, crashing, in his haste, to the cabin floor. Scrambling to his feet, he slams and bolts the hatch shut, managing a strangled cry for the others to hang on. Watching from the cabin strip window light and gripping the overhead handhold he sees it close on them, looming to an impossible height in front of her. Ever higher it rears, up and over them, till it seems it is going to crash onto her with all of its terrible weight....
79 Autohelm Remote Unit – p132 - Tonga to New Zealand – This is a nice little unit which means you can operate and change course from the protection of your spray hood. Would normally only be brought out in bad weather. With Autohelm, the face buttons are laid out in the same familiar pattern as the wired in model at your helming position, so it is easy to operate. A socket can be installed half way down the companionway. A nice little extra to have on hand if you don’t already have a command centre amidships. 83 Heaving To or ‘Hove To’ – p133 - Tonga to New Zealand – This is a wonderful technique to use in heavy weather. It calms the whole motion of the boat down and makes life much more comfortable below. Consider you are on a port tack. With three reefs in the main and the little staysail or storm jib close to the mast, tack the boat from your port tack to starboard tack without changing anything. Your staysail will be permanently backed up and you will now be on a starboard tack. Wheel your helm hard over to starboard and lash it in position. The boat will make very slow headway, crabbing, and quite a bit of leeway. On a starboard tack, you would do everything exactly the opposite. In our storm, we lost around 1.5 nautical miles overnight – not bad! The compensation was that we were able to ride out the storm in relative comfort. Practice this technique several times in moderate weather to familiarise yourself with it.
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