November 1988
Ed monitored the radio for official
weather reports, as well as for comments from other yachts in different parts
of the ocean. It sounded like there was wind further to the south.
Deciding to temporarily give up our westward course, we took down the sails,
and started the engine. We pointed the
bow due south, motoring for the next twenty-four hours.
Over 100 miles farther to the
south, we did find wind. On the
morning of our tenth day out of the Canary Islands, we again raised the twin
headsails, shut off the engine, engaged the autopilot, and resumed our
westerly trek. We had also moved ourselves into position for a
rendezvous with my nautical nemesis - the ship would come that very night.
Our schedule was organized so we
ate our one hot meal of the day at 4:00 p.m.
I then stood watch from 4:00-8:00 p.m., while Ed got his first sleep of
the night. On November 26th, I went on watch as usual. I enjoyed the nightly spectacle put on by
the setting sun, in conjunction with the puffy trade wind clouds. When
darkness came, it was absolute, as the moon wasn't due to rise till 8:00 p.m.
I would guess it was about 6:30
p.m. when I first noticed the lights of a ship off to starboard. We’d
been out for ten days, covered 950 miles, and this was only the third ship we
had seen since leaving the Canaries. We were hundreds of miles away from
the shipping lanes marked on the charts. I was actually pleased to see
the ship's lights as it would give me something to watch during an otherwise
boring stretch of time.
I took a good look and saw two
white lights, the rear one higher and to the right of the forward one, with the
red port light further back. I thought
I was seeing a freighter heading in the same direction as Tropic Moon.
The lights seemed to grow in size. I
decided the ship was coming more toward us, and would cross ahead of our
boat. (We didn’t have radar, so I was making my best guess.) I wasn't concerned, because many ships came
close to Tropic Moon. I attributed that
to curiosity on the part of the ships' crews, while Ed always said Tropic Moon
had an urge to mate with other ships.
I continued watching as the lights
grew, and was surprised to see the two white lights go horizontal in relation
to each other -- something I had never seen before. Then they seemed to
go back to their proper positions for a short time, and then go horizontal
again. I was confused, though not overly concerned; still thinking I was
seeing the side view of a ship passing us.
I decided to call Ed. I
walked to the hatch over the aft cabin, lifted it, and asked Ed if he would
come up on deck. There was a boat, and
I couldn't understand the lights. He asked if it was a sailboat. “No,” I replied, “a real ship."
At that point I lowered the hatch
and turned to face the lights. Peering
through the blackness, I realized the white lights had disappeared. That meant the ship was too close for me to
see the lights on deck. I could hear
the ship’s engines, and started screaming, bringing Ed at a run. Not able
to see anything but the red port light, Ed dashed forward to drop one of the
headsails.
Instinct took over. I jumped into the cockpit, pushed the button
to start the engine, and released the autopilot. As he ran back to the
cockpit, Ed saw me start to turn the wheel to the right, and yelled, "No,
the other way." Ed dropped into the cockpit in front of me, and put
the wheel hard over to port.
We both sat down, me behind Ed with
my legs on either side of him. Knowing he had just run up from his bunk,
and that he wasn't wearing a safety harness, I wrapped my arms tightly around
him. I decided wherever we were going,
we were going there together.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw
the ship for the first time. I gaped up at an immense black wall, towering
several stories above the water, huge white waves frothing around the bow, the
ship bearing down on us through the darkness. I had a flash of instant
recognition. This was my nightmare
ship.
“It’s going to hit us!” I cried.
Expecting to have Tropic Moon
smashed by the behemoth, I released my safety harness from where it was
attached to the deck. I didn’t want to
be dragged underwater if Tropic Moon sank.
I wrapped my arms back around Ed.
Before we had completed our turn,
we collided with the ship. It clipped
our bow, bending over the bow roller, and folding our steel bow pulpit like a
pretzel. The impact turned us sideways, pointing us in the same direction
as the ship. We banged down the whole
length of the ship as it passed.
It seemed to take an eternity. The noise was awful. The spreaders of both masts repeatedly hit
the ship. The main mast began to crack,
and the hulls scraped together (Ed saw sparks fly between the two steel
boats). There was plenty of time to think. Fully expecting to die, I thought of our families, and how they
wouldn't know what had happened to us, and how unfair that was to them.
Near the rear of the tanker, where
it curved under, Tropic Moon started to lean over, and be sucked under the
stern of the ship. About this time, the main mast snapped off and our
boat popped upright. The mizzenmast
spreader hit the tanker one last time, and then we came free. I saw the tops of the propeller, and the
foaming wash at the stern of the ship.
Ed was immediately up and looking
around. I stood in the cockpit, stunned.
I tried to turn the wheel, but found we’d lost our steering. I put the engine in neutral. During
the collision, a wave of water had come over the boat, pouring into the open
ports and hatches. We were drenched, as
well as everything inside the boat. Ed pumped the bilge, and then went
below to pull up floorboards, to see if we were taking on water.
I went below and connected our VHF
radio. I called, "Mayday! Mayday!
You've hit us." Ed heard me, and told me to stop. He said it wasn't a Mayday unless we were
actually sinking, and he didn't know yet if that were the case! In a
huff, I shut off the radio, without waiting for an answer, and went out to sit
in the cockpit. The spreader on the
mizzenmast, which had been dangling from a wire, let go. It crashed to the deck, right next to where
I was sitting. I realized, if I’d been
a foot over, the heavy wooden spreader could have cracked my head open like a
ripe melon. I was too numb to
care.
The tanker, which must have heard
my Mayday, had ghosted to a stop in the distance. The moon, now risen in the east, poised in the dark sky beyond
the ship. The serenity of that peaceful
scene contrasted sharply with the devastation surrounding Tropic Moon.
Once Ed had determined we weren't
sinking, he called the tanker, which had come to a halt about a half-mile away
from us. Ed cancelled the Mayday, and gave them a report on the
damage: the main mast broken off and in the water, both sails and all the
rigging in the sea, the mizzenmast still standing, but cracked along the glue
joints, the steering not functioning, but looking repairable, the steel hull
damaged, but apparently still intact.
We exchanged information with the
ship. We had tangled with a 135,000-ton
oil tanker, named Stratus, 900 feet in length and 100 feet in width. We
learned the ship was running empty, on passage from Philadelphia to Nigeria. Stratus was traveling southeast, we were
traveling west, and, hundreds of miles from the nearest land, our paths had
intersected.
We considered abandoning Tropic
Moon, and being taken aboard the tanker.
In the end, we decided to try to motor to the Cape Verde Islands, 300
miles distant. We didn’t have a chart for Cape Verde, and asked the
captain of the tanker if they could provide one. They agreed, and offered
to motor over with it. Ed asked them to
stay away from us until we were able to maneuver on our own. In the end,
the tanker stood by for five hours while we retrieved sails, strapped the
broken pieces of mast along the side of the hull, and Ed jury-rigged a fix on
the steering. It was with sheer terror on my part that we finally motored
over to the steep-sided hull of the towering tanker.
We could barely see the people on
deck; they were so high above us. They had prepared a chart for
us. The chart was well wrapped in plastic, tied into a bucket, and
suspended between two lengths of anchoring rope. There was
a monkey's fist at the end of one of the ropes. A monkey's fist is a
knot that's like a round, hard rock.
This was what they threw down onto Tropic Moon's deck.
Ed was handling his jury-rigged
steering. It was up to me to retrieve
the chart. I captured the monkey's fist, and then started hauling in on
the rope. Eventually, I reached the bucket, and tried to free the chart
from the bucket. It was tied in too securely. While I tried to hang on to the bucket, the
two boats were drifting apart. It
looked like I'd be pulled off Tropic Moon; I had no choice but to let go
of the rope.
The men on the deck of the tanker
saw what had happened. They pulled the
ropes and bucket back up to their deck. When Ed was able to maneuver Tropic
Moon close to the ship again, the men threw the monkey's fist for a second
time. But this time, when they saw I had pulled the bucket onto Tropic
Moon, knowing I wouldn't be able to free the chart, they let go of their end of
the rope. It fell into the sea. I
pulled the whole length of rope aboard. We motored away from the
ship while Ed expressed our thanks over the VHF radio.
The tanker sailed off into the
darkness, its lights sinking below the horizon, leaving us battered, and very
much alone, on a very lonely sea.
Link to purchase the book, Tropic Moon: Memories - http://www.blurb.com/b/
